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A division of HarperCollinsPublishers
www.harpercollins.co.uk
HarperImpulse an imprint of
HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperImpulse 2017
Copyright © Erin Lawless 2017
Cover images © Shutterstock.com
Cover design © Alex Allden 2017
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017
Erin Lawless asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © June 2017 ISBN: 9780008181765
Version 2017-05-18
PRAISE FOR ERIN LAWLESS
‘Funny and Addictive… If this is Erin Lawless’ first book, I can’t wait to read her next one!’
Fabulous Magazine (the Sun)
‘A lovely, warm read to snuggle up on the sofa with’
Novelicious
‘Devastatingly brilliant…an absolute triumph’
Books with Bunny
‘First there was Bridget and Mark; then there was Em and Dex and now there is Nadia and Alex…it is a rare thing to be able to make the love between two fictional characters become so real that you actually champion their love from your very roots’
Lisa Talks About…
‘Friendships, trust, lies, deceit, love and so much more – a real page-turner for me’
Cosmochicklitan
‘A superb debut about complicated ties, betrayal and lies, and one of my favourite books of the year’
ChickLit Club
‘Mind-blowingly good and everyone should read it’
ChickLitReviews
‘This book was so incredibly amazingly awesome that I want to shout it from the hilltops and make ALL my friends buy it this instant’
The Chiq Blog
For Jacqui, Joanne, Ksenia and Nicola – my beautiful, brilliant bridesmaids,
and for all of my Lawless Hens:
I’ll never forget the amazing weekend when we all met The Juan.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Praise for Erin Lawless
Dedication
Character List
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Also by Erin Lawless
About the Author
About HarperImpulse
About the Publisher
Character List
Please Save the Date
for the wedding of
NORA EILEEN DERVAN
and
HENRY ROBERT CLARKE
New Year’s Eve
Nora Dervan, the bride
Harry Clarke, the groom
Bea Milton, a bridesmaid – Nora’s godsister and best friend since birth
Cleo Adkins, a bridesmaid – Nora’s best friend from university
Daisy Frankel, a bridesmaid – an American girl Nora befriended while travelling in their early 20s
Sarah Norris, a bridesmaid – the wife of the Best Man
Cole Norris, the Best Man – friends with Harry, Nora and Bea since primary school
Eli Hale, a groomsman – friends with Harry, Nora and Bea since primary school
Barlow Osbourne, a groomsman – Harry’s best friend from university
Archie Clarke, a groomsman – Harry’s younger brother
Eileen Dervan, Nora’s mother and Bea’s godmother
Cillian, Aoife, Alannah and Finola Dervan – Nora’s younger brother and sisters
Hannah Milton, Bea’s mother and Nora’s godmother
Gray Somers, a colleague of Cleo’s teaching at the Oakland Academy
Claire, a friend of Nora and Bea’s since secondary school
Darren, Daisy’s current boyfriend
Kirsty, Bea’s flatmate
Chapter Thirty-Two
Cleo studied the top of Gray’s bent head; the harshness of the overhead strip lights threw a halo of paleness around his crown. He sat in quiet concentration, his bottom lip sucked in between his teeth, click-click-clicking his pen absent-mindedly as he read through his student’s essay. He’d been doing this lately, bringing his marking along to breaks and lunch, a not-so-subtle but ever-so-polite barrier between them.
For the millionth time in her life – and at least the hundredth time since she got back from Paris – Cleo reflected on how very, very much alcohol was not her friend. Oh, how she rued that message she’d sent him, that split second while she’d been spangled on champagne and frankly giddy from being at the Moulin Rouge, but most of all she rued the fact that she’d turned her phone off for the rest of the evening and missed the three attempted calls he’d made to her in response.
A combination of hangover, embarrassment and dealing with the fall-out of the Bea / Cole big reveal had eaten up much of the next day, but – after bidding the rest of the (slightly subdued) hen party contingent goodbye at the Eurostar terminal – Cleo had sat on the tube back towards Acton, her phone heavy in her hands, a message to Gray resolutely undrafted. Copping out completely, dreaming of a chip butty and her blissful king-sized bed, Cleo had decided that a cheerful, face-to-face chat over coffee during Monday break time, where she could play down her slight Single White Female craziness, perhaps even distract Gray by telling him all the hen do gossip.
As it turned out, she needn’t have worried. Gray had appeared at their usual spot, armed with an over-done smile and a sheath of coursework. He’d gone through the motions all right, asking if Nora had enjoyed her spinsterhood send-off, making all the right noises as Cleo showed him some of the funniest snaps on her phone. He hadn’t mentioned Cleo’s particularly passive-aggressive beauty of a message, or how it could neatly be translated into a caterwauling WHY DON’T YOU FANCY MEEEE? And so Cleo didn’t bring it up.
And here they were, three weeks later, still not talking about it, Gray still pretending to mark essays over his break (the end of term was approaching, he’d pointed out when she’d tentatively asked him what was up with the teachery diligence).
And to think – she’d been so concerned about her stupid crush ruining a great friendship. Seems like it had always been a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Cleo drained the lukewarm dregs of her coffee. Past Hallowe’en the staff room – along with everything inside it – retained absolutely no heat whatsoever. “Oh, man, I cannot wait for this term to be over!” she admitted, with feeling. With January and the mock exams looming just the other side of Christmas she’d found herself doing more marking, revision planning and tutoring than perhaps hours in the day strictly allowed.
“Just got to get through the big party first,” Gray pointed out, looking up from his papers with a flash of his former smile. Was it really a year since they’d properly met, over a glass of too-strong Disaronno and cranberry and a queasy, protesting stomach too-full of questionable canapés? None of that this year, Cleo promised herself (reminder again: alcohol is not your friend). Going by her track record she’d probably hitch up her cocktail dress and rugby tackle him to the floor. She looked up and met Gray’s eye-contact; he was still smiling.
In fact, maybe it would be better if she didn’t go to the Christmas party at all this year…
The house still smelt and felt the same as Sarah let herself in the front door; she didn’t know why, but she realised that she’d been expecting some sort of discernible difference. She let out the breath that she’d been holding as she’d fumbled over-loudly with her keys at the lock – it was clear from the stillness of the air that her former home was indeed empty, as she’d hoped. It was 2pm on a Tuesday – Cole was sure to be at work – but she knew that for the first week or so after she’d moved out he’d taken sick leave and hung around the house, hoping to catch her. Obviously his bosses’ patience had run out.
The pressure somewhat off her, Sarah lingered in the entrance hall, noting with a little satisfaction the furring of dust laying across the glass of the wall mirror, for all it was dim, the wintery mid-afternoon not allowing much light through the windows. She ran an experimental hand over the curl of the bannister – remembering idly that it was probably due its six-monthly oiling and varnishing. She supposed if she and Cole really did get divorced, then the house would have to go on the market sooner rather than later. Cole had fronted the entirety of the initial deposit, and paid about 75% of the mortgage – Sarah wondered if she’d even get anything from the proceeds.
She remembered their first viewing of the house. Cole had been more or less happy to let Sarah take the lead on house-hunting, but she had insisted that he make time for each and every appointment. Even though their budget was reasonable (thanks to Cole’s salary anyway – Sarah wouldn’t have had a hope of getting a mortgage on a garden shed without his uplift to their combined income) they’d quickly grown pretty disillusioned. Everything decent was too much of a commute to work. Everything more convenient was boxy, or damp, or in what her mother would have called (with a little sniff) a “rough neighbourhood”. So, when they found it, their two-bed, two-reception little town house had seemed like some sort of mirage. Cole had spent hours combing over the Homeowner’s Survey documentation, trying to work out where the catch was.
But – no catch – a few weeks, a few signatures and some eye-wateringly large bank transfers later, and the little townhouse was theirs. Sarah tried to picture another newly-engaged couple coming hopefully through that same front door grasping glossy particulars and floorplans, accompanied by an equally glossy estate agent. Her stomach rolled over itself in protest.
Feeling heavy and old, Sarah slowly climbed the stairs, distracting herself with yet another mental inventory of the bits and pieces she needed to pack, trying to focus on the task at hand. Still, she found herself hesitating at the threshold to the master bedroom and turning right, standing in the doorway she’d lost long minutes to the past. The absolute sadness of a purposeless space, of a nursery waiting for a crib – she’d flat out refused to allow Cole to buy a spare bed for overnight guests, no matter how many times he assured her it would just be temporary.
Christ. Sarah felt her top lip curl. The person she’d been in her youth would absolutely despair at the whinging, sopping woman she’d become. She turned her back on the empty second bedroom, and went to pack up the jewellery she’d left behind.
***
“Okay, Daisy,” the nurse was saying in a perfectly practiced NHS-tone as she matter-of-factly tucked a wodge of blue tissue paper into the elastic of her undies. At least this was validation that Daisy had been right to spend a little extra time on bikini line maintenance the evening before. “Now this might be a teeny bit chilly, but it will warm up, I promise!”
Despite the warning, Daisy flinched as the woman squirted a clear stream of gel from a tube directly onto the skin of her exposed abdomen; it felt like a knife of ice. The hard head of the sonographer’s wand wasn’t much better; it pressed insistently into the softness of Daisy’s belly like it was trying to iron out the folds of skin there. Somewhere, deep inside, her supposed foetus was in there, and according to the pregnancy app she’d downloaded, currently the size of a lime. Daisy held her breath, with no idea why.
The sonographer’s brow creased ever-so-slightly as she peered at the screen, maddeningly angled away from Daisy. The wand pressed in a little harder, rolling over from right to left, and then back again, before being abruptly withdrawn. Daisy felt hard, spiking panic gripping at every part of her. Oh shit. Shit. She’d only known about this baby for two weeks. She’d not really been thinking of it as real, if she was honest, but suddenly – with that faint furrow of concern between the nurse’s eyebrows – it was the realest, realest thing that could or would ever exist for her.
“Okay, Daisy,” the woman repeated, all cheerful business. “Now what I need for you to do is to bend your legs, bring your heels up to your bum for me, then lift your hips and give everything a good shake.”
Daisy, who was halfway through complying with the instructions to bring her feet up to her middle before the nurse got to the end of her sentence, almost fell off the table.
“A good shake?” she echoed, panicked. “Why? Is there something wrong?” Was this how they encouraged along miscarriages of unviable pregnancies? Surely not. Daisy felt sick. For the millionth time in the last fourteen days she cursed every single alcoholic drink she’d consumed, every ibuprofen pill she’d popped, all of the hundred foetus-unfriendly things she may have done while she was still unknowing.
“Nothing’s wrong,” the sonographer assured her immediately, putting a capable hand to one of Daisy’s knees to gently force her legs and feet back into the instructed stance. “Baby’s just in an awkward position, and I just want to see if we can make them move around and say hi!”
Still numb with anxiety, Daisy did as she was told, lifting her hips from the bed and waggling them repeatedly from left to right.
“Okay, let’s try again.” Once again the wand pressed in unrelentingly. “That’s a little better!” the sonographer said, brightening, before reaching out with the hand that wasn’t holding the wand to push the screen on its bracket so that Daisy could see too.
It was exactly as she’d expected at first. A nondescript grey landscape, like the kind she’d seen a thousand times in movies, or on her Facebook newsfeed. The pale shape in the centre twitched and moved – moved! – and suddenly Daisy realised she could see an arm, could see the little slope of a nose.
“Okay, so this is the head,” the nurse confirmed, clicking a button and zooming in on the relevant part of the image. Daisy realised she was craning up on her elbows a little, desperate to see. “And legs, and arms – see one of them is up by the side of the face?” Oh, yes, Daisy saw. “That little black area in the middle there, that’s baby’s stomach. They’ll already be swallowing and passing the amniotic fluid, so that’s very good. And I’m just going to log the heartrate, but I can already tell it’s about right.”
And Daisy started to cry: big, deep, unladylike, gasps – because there it was, the baby she hadn’t even known had been growing inside of her for these long weeks, the true cause of her endless fatigue, her loss of appetite, the “stomach flu” that had seen her off sick from work with her head down the toilet. And it was fine. Its little heart was right there, bright and flickering and strong and fine.
“Okay, so from the crown to rump length, I’m putting you at… 11 weeks and 6 days,” the sonographer confirmed with a smile. “So that will put conception back around, ooh, September 20th or thereabouts.”
Daisy’s eyes fluttered closed. Darren’s birthday weekend. Well, they’d done the drunken duvet dance several times that night after dinner, so she guessed the odds were always going to have been that way inclined. Oh god. How was she ever going to look this child in the face whilst knowing that it was conceived during a stay at a self-advertised “Sex Hotel” in Blackpool that had had a mirror stuck to the ceiling?
The sonographer chatted away happily, snapping pictures of the baby, zooming in and away and from different angles. Daisy drank it all in, ignoring the rub and burn as the lubricating gel ran thin and the ultrasound wand pressed across her, cry-laughing as she noticed how the baby squirmed away as if the pressure was bothering it. She couldn’t believe how much it was moving – a bad dancer already, just like its mommy! – yet she couldn’t feel the slightest thing. It was like a dream.
“Just a few more measurements now and we’re all done. And you can go to the loo!” For all Daisy didn’t want the appointment to end, this was welcome news: the appointment letter had been quite insistent that she come to the scan with a full bladder and she was more than a little uncomfortable at this point.
“Say, see you in two months, baby!” the sonographer trilled – before withdrawing the wand and leaving Daisy feeling oddly bereft – pulling the blue medical paper from the elastic of her underwear and swabbing up the smeared remnants of the gel on Daisy’s stomach with it. Her skin still felt tacky and cold under all her winter layers as Daisy – stumbling and shell-shocked – exited the ultrasound suite. The slightly peaky-looking, I-need-the-toilet-jiggling woman sat in the waiting area outside shot her a conspiratorial smile. The husband or partner glanced up from his laminate-bound parenting tome to expectantly watch the suite doors, not-so-patiently awaiting his turn to greet his offspring.
Darren. She had to tell him. Daisy’s palms suddenly felt very sweaty. She slipped the tiny square sonogram images the nurse had given to her into her planner to keep them safe. She pulled out her mobile phone. Shamefully, shamefully, she’d already deleted his number. She’d have to Facebook message him. Poke. Hey, remember me? Smiley face. Well, you certainly left me something to remember you by…
Well. Obviously her opening approach needed some careful crafting.
Heading in the direction of the toilets, hoping she had enough time left before her appointment for her blood tests, Daisy opened up her WhatsApp and tapped into Nora’s Bridesmaids group for ease.
Big news, she typed out to her friends. Immense, large-scale news. Immediate discussion mandatory. Dinner this week? xx
Chapter Thirty-Three
I was the maid of honour at a wedding where the bride and groom had written their own vows, and my mate gave them to me to look after until they were needed. Needless to say, beautiful empire-line bridesmaids’ dresses do not have pockets, so I safely placed her beautifully written words of love into my cleavage whilst helping her with last minute touch-ups… Halfway through the ceremony it was time for the vows. My friend stared at me for a full minute before I remembered. So, right there at the front, next to a priest, I had to reach in-between my boobs, only to find the folded paper had slipped out of place and moved, making for an awkward, terribly silent few moments of me digging around.
Becka, Bath
Bea inspected the Order of Service she’d just folded together with a critical eye. She was the better part of a glass of wine down and she suspected her accuracy might be suffering the effects. She tried to mitigate the wonky spine by lining up the corners a little more neatly. It was passable; she duly added it to the nearby pile.
Harry breezed through the front room, hairy shins and knees bravely bared to the December cold; Bea shivered in sympathy inside her cable corded knit and sipped gratefully at her glass of warming red.
“I won’t be too long,” he promised Nora as he smoothed her hair back and kissed her jaw line. “I’ll just do the one set.”
“Still, your willpower puts me to shame,” Nora pointed out ruefully, inclining her own glass of wine towards him. Most brides hike up the weight loss efforts in the last few weeks but Nora, particularly with Christmas indulgences sat squarely between herself and the altar, seemed content to slide off the wagon (glass of red in hand). Still, she had definitely slimmed down over the months since her engagement; even just sat cross-legged in front of the sofa in leggings, fluffy socks and an over-sized jumper she seemed sharper, more gamine. Bea was put in mind of the teenaged Nora, that window of time between the melting away of pre-puberty puppy fat and the poor diet of the student years, where Nora had been a bit like this, all cheekbone.
“Well, can I pick up anything on the way back?” Harry offered, eyes twinkling. “Something for dinner? Another bottle?”
Nora paused in her folding, clearly tempted. “I shouldn’t…”
“Are you sure? I’m literally walking back straight past Happy Dragon…”
“Oh, well then, it would be rude not to!” Bea laughed. “Make mine sweet and sour chicken balls, please!”
Nora sighed dramatically. “Well, I suppose it will be you that has to deal with the melt-down if my dress doesn’t button up on the day.”
Harry clapped his hands to his ears at the hint of bridal buttons and Nora laughed. He didn’t want to know even the tiniest detail about the wedding dress.
“Okay then. How many calories can there even be in special fried rice? Don’t answer that! Let me just see what I’ve got in the way of cash.” Nora unfolded her legs and hopped up to search out her eternally errant handbag, Harry trailing after her as he made a note of what to order later using an app on his phone. Knowing there would soon be greasy takeaway to soak up the alcohol and hopefully improve the straightness of her folding, Bea took another drink. She inspected Nora’s own pile, which didn’t seem all that much better than her own, and felt a little better.