The Wedding Night by Harriet Walker (story reading txt) 📕

That was why she’d also begged Lizzie to come with them, so that she might lick her wounds in their company rather than alone, in the flat she used to share with her now former fiancé.

As Anna glanced out the window and Steve began to slow to pull off for the exit toward the airport’s vast expanses of car park, there came the sound of two phones, hers and Effie’s, vibrating in unison as the same message arrived to them both simultaneously.

It was from Lizzie: “Are you at the airport yet? Running a bit late—eek! Can’t wait to see you both.”

5. Effie

Ben was waiting there for her after the security checks. Broad and beaming with a nervous smile that made Effie’s own slightly jittery stomach lurch like a stalling car, he bent to kiss her cheek before greeting Anna and Steve. He had carefully saved a table large enough for the whole group, took coffee orders as the three of them schlepped their wheelies out of the way, and went to the bar as they settled in.

“I’m sorry—you’re seeing someone?” Anna said to Effie, once he was out of earshot, eyebrows raised practically to her hairline and her voice well above its usual pitch. “And it’s best man Ben?”

“We…just hit it off about a month ago,” she replied, embarrassed but earnest. “He’s kind of great.” And when Anna pressed her—on the when, the how, the what it all meant—she added: “Let’s just see, shall we? Even I don’t know yet.”

Ben handed the drinks around carefully, remembered perfectly who had asked for what, refusing repayment. Deliberately lingered as he brushed Effie’s fingers with his own when it was her turn to take a steaming cup. He settled into the chair next to hers and wiggled his eyebrows at her when Effie next summoned the courage to look up into his face.

Across the table, Anna waved at someone behind them: Lizzie, sprinting across the departures lounge, looking just as she used to coming back from college hockey practice when she would stop by Effie and Anna’s rooms for a cup of tea, dressed in a gray marled sweatshirt and navy jogging bottoms with her hair pulled back into a rough ponytail.

Already the shaken and shell-shocked woman Effie had put her arm around earlier that week seemed more herself again; she even managed a triumphant smile as she heaved her handbag down onto a chair. But it faded, replaced with confusion—and something else—when Lizzie registered the man at Effie’s side.

“Ben?” she asked bluntly, her voice hoarse with feeling. Lizzie’s face was suddenly full of color, her eyes threatening to brim over with glossy tears. “What are you doing here?”

Ben’s expression stuttered like a blinking bulb. Anna, too, looked taken aback, her face stricken by a horrified half-smile, the body’s betraying impulse to laugh at awkwardness, to smooth away the edge it had introduced.

“It was my idea, Lizbet,” Effie said hurriedly, leaning across the table so that Lizzie was looking into her friendly face rather than Ben’s flustered one. “I asked him to come.”

Lizzie’s mouth moved as though in silent recital of some unknown text, her eyes searching Effie’s as though reading words in a foreign language.

“We were going to leave it until after the wedding so we didn’t distract from anything, but…” Effie’s voice cracked a little at the reveal. “Ben and I have been seeing each other for a little while.”

She turned her head to smile at him and saw that his face had begun to relax too. Effie felt a rush of tenderness for him: he had been so thoughtfully reticent about whether he should come this week, considering only Dan and whether or not his oldest friend might need the company in London instead. Effie could have been more careful of her friend’s feelings too, she realized.

“I’m so sorry, Lizbet,” she said. “We didn’t mean to give you a shock.”

“Surprise!” Ben laughed nervously.

Lizzie’s breath tumbled out as though she had been kicked in the stomach. “Well!” she laughed—a little too loudly—and Effie noticed the tears remaining in her eyes. “I didn’t realize I’d be the seventh wheel at my own wedding party….But still, what a treat to go away with you lot again.”

She didn’t want coddling or fussing over, she said, just good company and a change of scene—where else to go than on the holiday she had so carefully planned every minute of for the past six months, she joked.

The rest of the group collectively blushed and smiled, unsure how to reply but nodding as though it really was funny: a bride heading to the venue where her wedding no longer was. Effie found she suddenly felt nervous: she knew a change of surroundings could be a good thing, but she was fairly certain that the scenery involved should be new and invigorating, rather than one intended to have been the backdrop to cherished photos that would now never be taken.

“All right, gang?” A smooth, treacly voice interrupted her thoughts: Charlie. He and Iso were standing behind her chair, smiling down at the rest of them with impossibly bleached, rich-person teeth that sang out from already-tanned skin. “Everyone, this is Iso; Iso, these are the reprobates I warned you about.”

The woman standing next to him turned her own full-beam smile on the group and waved, directing her gaze carefully to each of them in turn as they introduced themselves.

“Just a turmeric latte for me,” Iso said as she took a seat and Charlie went to the counter.

A turmeric latte. Effie had been wondering whether it was too early for a gin and tonic.

Iso, Charlie’s new—first proper—girlfriend was, not to put too fine a point on it, completely gorgeous: long, tumbling waves of dark hair, big, brown, Bambi-lashed eyes, and a café au lait tan that spoke of a regular holiday regime far away from the Home Counties, which had shaped her cut-glass vowels and consonants. Her long, tanned legs in