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I put down the phone with a sigh, deciding to ignore the doorbell, but not knowing what, if anything, I could do beyond that. My whole body had gone into an elaborate non-functioning state. I should have been crying or screaming or throwing even more things across the room, but I had neither the energy nor the inclination to do any of those things. Instead, I keeled over on to the sofa, arms wide, sacrificing myself to the wedding God.
Only half an hour ago, my life had been perfect. My future mapped out like a Cath Kidston photo collage, full of impossibly cheerful moments in a perpetually sunny, floral vista. And now – well, it wasn’t.
‘Open the bloody door.’ A muffled voice wafted down the hallway.
I jumped up in my seat, fear racing through my body. I slipped the backs of my hands beneath my knees, bit on my lip and held my body tight with tension, hoping if I stayed like that for any length of time the annoying person ringing my bell would get the message and leave. Then I might think about breathing again. And decide what the hell I was going to do next.
‘Anna, I know you’re in there. Come on, open up. I need a coffee and a piss. Hurry up.’
Ben! After Ed and Sophie, he was possibly the last person in the world I wanted to see.
‘Ben!’ I wailed, putting on my most sickly, leave-me-alone, I-really-am- dying voice. ‘I’m on the sofa. Feeling rough. Really rough. Sickness, diarrhoea. Virulent and catching. Sorry! I can’t … I can’t … I’ll call you.’
‘Open the door, Anna.’
Aaargh, God. I prised myself off the sofa with a huge effort, my body suddenly taking on super-heavyweight proportions and lumbered towards the door.
‘You took your time.’ Ben breezed into the flat, looking like he just wandered in off a Boden menswear shoot. In fawn-coloured cargo shorts and hot-pink polo shirt, the collar popped, he cast his gaze over me, scratching his head distractedly. ‘Christ, you look rough. What’s up?’
‘Ill. Very ill.’ I braved a glance at his concerned expression and immediately wished I hadn’t. Ben represented everything that was familiar and reassuring in my life, only now he’d taken on an altogether different appearance. I’d known him for ever, or for what seemed like for ever, ever since we’d started senior school. It seemed only natural when we ended up at the same university too. We shared everything together, all those angst-ridden teenage traumas, all the highs and lows. I’d seen him through his break-ups with various highly unsuitable girls, and he’d seen me through all the boys I’d just been practising on before I met Ed. And then when I met Ed, everything fell into place and Ben seemed to like Ed, almost as much as I did. So much so that their bromance developed to such an extent that Ed asked Ben to be his best man. That had to be a good omen, didn’t it? But now, uncovering the secrets of that wretched diary, our merry little band was about to be blown into tiny smithereens.
‘You need to go,’ I said, clutching my stomach as though I might just die. ‘You might catch it.’
‘What? And leave you like this? No way. I’ll take my chances, thanks. Let me make you a cup of tea. It’s probably all the stress of the wedding finally catching up with you. Hey, I’d be throwing up all the time too if I knew I was getting married at the weekend. Back in a mo!’ he said, dashing off to the bathroom.
I jumped up, fired by an urgency to do something, anything, but most importantly to get Ben out of the flat. And me too, I decided, in that instant. I needed to get out of the claustrophobic confines of this God-awful place .
Just being here was suffocating me. I couldn’t be here when Sophie came back or if Ed turned up. Although that looked unlikely. They were probably holed up somewhere together, shagging each other senseless.
‘Hey, what are you doing?’ Ben was back, standing in the doorway, brandishing a mug of tea in his hand.
‘I’m just going to pack up a couple of bits, that’s all. I need to get away for a few days. Take a bit of a break.’
‘Whoa, whoa, whoa.’ He put the mug down on the coffee table and dashed over to where I was rooting through my handbag. ‘What’s this all about?’
‘It’s nothing.’ My whole body prickled with suppressed emotion. When he took hold of my arms, gazing deep into my eyes, I knew I couldn’t hold it together a moment longer. Tears rushed down my cheeks, short, shuddering breaths escaping my mouth. Ben peered closer, but I pushed him away, grabbing my bag.
‘Leave it, Ben. Don’t worry. I have to go. Please don’t say anything to Ed, will you?’
‘What? No. I won’t. But I’m not letting you go anywhere. You’re ill.’ He tilted his head, peering into my eyes. ‘You are ill, aren’t you? Or is there something else that you’re not telling me about? Come on, Anna, what’s going on?’ The tenderness in his voice broke what was left of my heart into smithereens. He put an arm around my waist pulling me into his side, my breathing still ragged. He mopped away my tears with the back of his thumb, tidying away the stray strands of my newly highlighted blonde hair behind my ears.
‘As your husband-to-be’s best man, I would be failing in my duty if I didn’t make sure you were okay. I can’t let you just wander off days before the wedding without telling anyone where you’re going. Besides, I’m guessing it’s only natural to get cold feet. If that’s what this is all about? Are you feeling a bit overwhelmed by the whole occasion? I must admit, I’m feeling overwhelmed and I’m not the one getting married!’ He gave a rueful shrug. ‘You’ve been rushing around like a maniac these last few weeks; it’s bound to catch up with you. Look at you,’ he said, doing a secondary mopping up on the tears, ‘you’re completely wrung out.’
‘Oh God, Ben, it’s awful, really awful.’ I dropped the bag to the floor, along with the last vestiges of energy, my shoulders slumping in defeat. ‘I don’t even know if there is going to be a wedding now.’
‘Shit, no.’ He took a step backwards, his gaze scanning my face. ‘You’re kidding, right?’
‘Do I look as though I’m kidding?’ I sniffed, my whole body shuddering at the effort involved. ‘No, Ben. It looks as though Ed, my wonderful husband-to-be, has been screwing Sophie, my so-called best friend. There! Now do you think I’m kidding?’
His eyes closed as he exhaled a deep and heavy breath.
‘How do you know?’
‘How do I know? I’ve just read it in her diary, that’s how I know.’
He reeled backwards, his eyes now wide.
‘You read Sophie’s diary?’
‘That is not the point, Ben. That is so not the point. The point is that my fiancé and my best friend have been sleeping with each other behind my back and my whole world has collapsed like a failed soufflé.
‘I’m supposed to be getting married on Saturday, a day that has been planned with military precision to ensure that not a single piece of confetti will be out of place. I have two hundred and eight-two people turning up, hundreds of canapés being prepared probably as we speak, feathered butterflies and rose petals being drafted in by the lorry load and a whole bloody team of experts on stand-by to make sure my big day is as fabulously wonderful as one day can possibly be.
‘That is the point, Ben. That is the real point. And my mum!’ I screamed, as if I’d only just remembered I had one. Pain stabbed at my chest and I looked down just to check someone wasn’t stabbing knitting needles into my heart. I dropped my head into my hands, not knowing how I would ever face her again.
‘Oh no! She’ll be absolutely devastated. She’s been looking forward to this day ever since … well, ever since she put me into that first pink Babygro! And you’ll never know the lengths we’ve been to to find her bloody dress and hat. We’ve been in every boutique in the country looking for just the right shade of aquamarine. It’ll break her heart if she doesn’t get the chance to wear it. And all our family and friends! She’ll be mortified if she has to tell them the wedding is cancelled.’
‘Hey. You’re talking as if it’s all over. You don’t know that yet. You can’t make any decisions until you’ve talked to Ed. Have you spoken to him?’
‘No.’ I bit on my lip, my foot tapping away at the floor as though it didn’t actually belong to me. ‘I have no desire to speak to Ed. Ever again. Ever.’ Just in case Ben was in any doubt whatsoever. I pushed back my cuticles with a thumbnail, turning my gaze on him. ‘What did you mean how do I know?’
‘Sorry?’ I saw the flicker of panic in his eyes, the shift of his jaw.
‘When I told you about Ed and Sophie, you said, “How do you know?” Not, “Jesus, Anna, you’ve got that wrong. You must be mistaken. Ed would never do that to you.” You said, “How do you know?”, as though you knew all along. Did you?’
He dropped his gaze, literally squirming on the spot.
‘Did you know, Ben?’
‘Look, Anna—’
‘Fucking hell! You did know! The three people in the world who are my closest friends, who I thought would never do anything to hurt me, have all been lying to me, laughing at me behind my back. Have you any idea how that feels? I don’t understand, Ben. I just don’t understand it. You’re supposed to be my friend!’
‘It wasn’t like that, Anna.’ He grabbed hold of me by the shoulders and I pushed him away, both hands on his chest, feeling my face flaring. ‘I only just found out this week. I promise you. No one’s been laughing behind your back. Especially not me.’
I sniffed back the tears and ran upstairs, scooping up my toothbrush, knickers, jeans and T-shirts and came running back downstairs again, stuffing the contents of my arms into a holdall. Ben circled me, giving me a wide berth as though I was a highly dangerous animal, which at that moment I probably was. His hands twitched to reach out to me, but my body prickled with ‘don’t come anywhere near me’ vibes. I still couldn’t believe he’d been in on all of this.
‘Ed told me the other day. I think he was desperate to get it off his chest, to get all this cleared and out of the way before the wedding. Hell, I was as shocked as you are now. I can’t believe what an idiot he’s been. I told him he had to tell you or else I would. That’s why I came here today. To see if you knew. . You shouldn’t have found out this way.’
We both fell silent for a moment, eyeing each other warily.
‘But honestly, Anna, you need to speak to him, hear what he has to say. I’m not defending him, I promise, but I do know Ed loves you more than anything else in this world. He’s in a hell of state over all this. He got in way too deep and didn’t know how to get out of it. Marrying you, making you his wife, it’s absolutely the most important thing to him.’
‘Ha, well, he has a funny way of showing it,’ I said, picking up my keys from the coffee table, jingling them in my hands and looking around the flat where I’d shared so many happy times with Sophie. Things would never be the same between us again.
‘Wait, Anna! Where will you go?’
The question pulled me up short. I felt a pain deep in my chest and wondered briefly if I was having a heart attack. Then the pain took over and my body gave way beneath me as I fell onto the sofa, huge gulping sobs wracking my body.
‘I don’t know,’ I gulped through the tears. ‘There isn’t anywhere I can go.’ I thought of my parents sitting in their lovely home, looking forward excitedly to the wedding of their only daughter, completely oblivious to the fact that all their hard work and planning had just gone up in a puff of smoke. I imagined my mum’s crestfallen face when I told her what Ed had done. ‘I can’t tell Mum, not yet. It will kill her. No, I need to get my head straight,’ I said, thinking aloud. ‘Work out what I’m going to do. Promise me you won’t tell anyone. Especially not Ed or Sophie. Please don’t tell them I know, not yet.’
‘Yeah, but …’ He scrunched up his face and lowered his voice, as if he hardly dared to utter the words hovering on his tongue. ‘I hate to say this, Anna, but you haven’t got a lot of time. You’re getting married in a few days’ time. You can’t just bury your head in the sand and pretend none of this has happened. I mean, do you even still want to marry Ed?’
‘No! Definitely not.’ Sadness swept over me. ‘I don’t know. How can we marry after this? It was meant to be the day of my dreams and now he’s gone and ruined everything.’ I sighed, still unable to quite believe what had happened. The thought of my stunning silk dress hanging in the wardrobe at my parents’ house brought even more tears to my eyes. Would I even get the chance to wear it now? What about all my little bridesmaids and their lovely dresses? They would be so disappointed. And all those delicious canapés I’d ordered. The five-course wedding breakfast. The champagne. The string quartet and the live band for the evening do. The disco. This was all Sophie’s fault. The cow! So much work and effort had gone into my one special day. I couldn’t bear the thought that it would all come to nothing. ‘Maybe Ed and Sophie should be getting married instead!’
Ben gave a rueful smile, but his expression was pained.
‘Don’t be silly. It’s you he wants to marry. But you need to talk all this through with him.’
‘I’m not even sure what I’d say to him.’
‘Look, come and stay with me. This has been one hell of a shock. You won’t be thinking straight. Come to mine; take a day or two to think about it, and then decide what you’re going to do. You don’t want to make any rash decisions. I won’t say anything to Sophie or Ed, not until you’re ready to face them. We can come up with an excuse, tell them you’ve gone to your mum’s a few days early or something.’
‘Could I? You don’t mind? What about Ed? He’s your friend.’
‘Yes, but so are you, Anna. And besides, you were my friend first,’ he said, in a touching show of allegiance. There was a smile hovering on his lips that went a small way to making me feel a bit better.
‘Oh Ben!’ I threw my around his neck, and dropped my head onto his chest, dampening his lovely pink polo with my tears and snot. Very gallantly, he wiped them away with his arm, only cringing slightly at the grossness. ‘Why do you think he did it? Wasn’t I enough for him? Sophie’s not even his type.’
‘I don’t know. He’s a bloody idiot, if you ask me.’ He made circular movements with his hand on my back, holding himself at a distance from my soggy warmth. ‘I don’t think it was planned or premeditated, if that’s any consolation. I think it just happened. A mistake, and then, well, I guess he just kept on repeating that mistake. You know what it’s like.’
Was I hearing him right?
‘Actually, Ben, forgive me, but I don’t know what it’s like. I would never have done anything like that to him. He’s supposed to love me. You don’t do that to someone you love. Especially not with her best friend. Oh God. Don’t you see what this means? I’ve lost my fiancé, my best friend and my bloody home in one fell swoop. What will I do?’
He shrugged, looking woefully out of his depth.
‘It didn’t mean anything to Ed. That’s what he told me. And I believe him on that score. But once he got himself involved with Sophie, I think it took on a life force of its own. It wasn’t easy for him to get out of it.’
‘Huh! Poor him! But that really isn’t my problem. As far as I’m concerned, they’re welcome to each other.’
At the sound of the key in the front door, we both jumped in our seats, the fear I was feeling reflected in Ben’s startled expression.
‘Oh, shit, shit, shit.’ I leapt up off the sofa, doing an Irish jig on the spot. ‘I can’t see her. Not like this. I might cry or break down or … or murder her or something.’
Ben’s eyebrow did a doubtful dance as he put a finger to my lips.
‘Just act normal,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll do all the talking. And, don’t worry, I’ll make sure you don’t actually murder her.’
Act normal, act normal. What was normal behaviour when you’d just found out your best friend had been screwing your fiancé? I think murder had to be high up there.
‘Hi!’ Sophie wandered in through the front door looking as though she owned the place, which strictly speaking she did, but in the circumstances I thought it was a bit insensitive of her to look quite so damn smug about it. ‘Oh hi, Ben. What are you doing here?’ she said casually.
I couldn’t have murdered her even if I’d wanted to, which I obviously did, but at that moment I found my whole body rooted to the spot. I’d completely lost the power of speech and was aware that my mouth had dropped open unflatteringly. It was like seeing Sophie for the first time. Only now she’d grown horns and fanged teeth.
‘We were just going through the honeymoon list, weren’t we, Anna?’ Ben nudged me in the ribs. ‘I need to make sure Ed gets on that plane with everything he needs for a fortnight in the sun. If he forgets his swimming cozzie then it’s down to me. Huge responsibility, eh?’
We’d spent weeks poring over travel brochures comparing one exotic Caribbean island to another, the thought of those golden, sweeping beaches, the beach huts on stilts, the roasting-hot sun, sustaining us through the stresses of organising the wedding. Although strictly speaking, I’d been the one doing all the organising. Ed’s contribution was in a chief-executive, advisory and signing-off capacity only. Clearly he’d had other much more important matters on his mind.
Whatever else happened, I knew, standing there, looking at Sophie as though she were a stranger, that there was absolutely no way I was cancelling that bloody honeymoon. I’d been looking forward to it for so long that if necessary I’d go on my own.
‘You okay?’ Sophie was trying, but failing, to make eye contact with me.
‘Fine thanks.’ It took all my will-power to raise my head and flash her my most insincere smile. ‘Just feeling a bit rough, that’s all.’
‘Yeah, I’ve persuaded her to go to her mum’s for a few days,’ Ben added brightly. ‘She could probably do with a bit of pampering in the run-up to the big day.’
‘Oh right. That sounds like a good idea. Um … I hope you feel better soon then.’
I bit on the inside of my lip, my gaze locking with Ben’s as we heard her wander upstairs. Had the atmosphere always been this awkward between us? Or only since Sophie had been sleeping with my fiancé? Had I been so wrapped up in my own smug soon-to-be-married bubble that I hadn’t even noticed that Sophie could barely talk to me, that her underlying resentment wafted through the air like the stench of gone-off vegetables?
‘Can we go?’ I said, desperate now to get out of the flat.
‘Yeah. I’ll take your bag.’ Ben ushered me into the hallway, calling up the stairs. ‘We’re off now, Sophie. We’ll catch up with you later in the week, yeah?’
‘Okay! Oh, Anna,’ she called, coming halfway down the steps, the lightest of smiles resting on her lips, ‘have you been in my bedroom?’
‘What?’ My heart froze. It felt as if my whole life stopped in that moment. My breath caught in the back of my throat.
I looked her directly in the eye. If I had been standing behind her at that moment it would have been so easy to give her a shove, to hear the thump, thump, thump of her body falling down the stairs. An image of the diary, its pages ripped out, blood trailing the carpet, crumpled bodies on the floor, flashed into my mind. My pulse thumped so rapidly from every part of my body I felt certain they’d both hear it.
‘Oh yeah, I was looking for my earrings,’ I said, brazening it out.
Sophie giggled, her relief echoing through the hall.
‘Oh sorry, babe,’ she said, not looking in the remotest part sorry. ‘I completely forgot. Here.’ She unscrewed them from her ears and handed them back to me.
It took all my will-power not to fling them straight back at her.
Chapter Three
‘Bitch. I hate her. Not content with stealing my man, she thinks it’s okay to help herself to my jewellery too. What else does she want? My clothes? My job? Does she want my whole fucking life? Is that what this is all about?’
Ben clipped in his seatbelt and leant across and did the same to me, before pulling the Range Rover out into the street outside the flat.
‘I don’t know, Anna,’ he said, his voice heavy with regret and frustration.
‘I thought she was my best friend. I thought she was happy for me. God, all the time I’ve been with Ed, I’ve seen her through dozens of boyfriends, listening as she went on and on about how marvellous this latest one was, how this one might be the one. Then propping her up when it all went horribly wrong. Which it always did. She’s got rotten bloody taste in men,’ I said indignantly, the irony not lost of me. ‘Did she look at me and think, Oh, Anna’s got it right. Her life’s settled. I’ll just help myself to her boyfriend instead.
‘Don’t torture yourself with it, Anna. It’s not worth it. And you’ll only make yourself miserable imagining what’s gone on.’
‘Good advice, Ben. Good advice. I won’t think about it. That’ll be easy. I’ll just forget all about it, shall I? Pretend it hasn’t happened. Why didn’t I think of that? Drop me off here and I’ll run back home and get on with my wedding plans.’
‘Sorry. I’m not saying that. I just hate seeing you like this. It breaks my heart, really it does. I wish I could do something to make it all better, but I can’t. Speak to Ed. He’s the one who should be giving you all the answers.’
‘Humph!’ I stared out of the passenger-side window, tears blurring my view of the world outside, a world where people were going about their daily business as though a huge boulder hadn’t rolled into their lives today, crushing everything in sight. ‘I told you. I’m not sure I want to speak to Ed ever again.’
I hated sniping at Ben; it wasn’t his fault I’d been cheated on. It wasn’t his fault my fiancé was a cheating, lying toerag. It wasn’t his fault the wedding of the century looked to be on the brink of being cancelled. It wasn’t his fault he was driving me away from the life I thought I’d been destined to see out, happily ever after, to a bleak and uncertain future.
‘Didn’t you think to tell me, Ben? As soon as you found out? I know you’re good friends and everything, but didn’t you think when Ed told you that juicy little snippet about his love life, that you ought to mention it to me? To save me from making the biggest mistake of my life. I think if the boot had been on the other foot, I might have done that for you.’
‘I was going to, I promise you, but it was difficult. I was put in the worst possible position. I thought it would be better if Ed told you. I told him if he didn’t then I would.’
‘Oh right, and when was that going to happen, then? Before the wedding? After the wedding? On our twentieth wedding anniversary?’
He shrugged.
‘He begged me not to tell you and he promised, on his life, that it was over between him and Sophie. I think he realised he’d made the biggest mistake of his life. I felt as though he deserved a second chance, that your relationship deserved a second chance,
‘It wasn’t your decision to make, though,’ I said furiously. ‘I should have been told what was going on. So that I could make up my own mind.’
I didn’t know what was worse: that Ed and Sophie had been at in the first place or that Ben had been prepared to cover up their lies.
‘I know. I’ve not been able to stop thinking about it. That’s why I came to see you today. I couldn’t let you marry Ed without you knowing what’s been going on. I didn’t know how I was going to do it, but if Ed wasn’t going to tell you, then I knew I needed to do it for myself. Only you got there first.’
I turned my body away again, resting my head on the passenger-door window. Would it have made any difference if Ben had told me or if it had come from Ed instead? Either way it couldn’t have taken away the shock or pain of finding out that my whole life had been a massive lie.
For the rest of the journey, we stayed in silence, locked in our own thoughts until Ben pulled the car into the driveway of the white-washed cottage that sat alone at the end of a twisting country lane. He sighed as he turned off the ignition. ‘Look, I’m sorry if you feel I’ve let you down. That wasn’t my intention at all. Come on,’ he said, laying a hand on my knee, ‘let’s go inside, I’ll make you that cup of tea.’