Effie saw them all through Iso’s eyes: the jilted bride, a hungover scarecrow, a pair of tired-looking, hip-once-but-slightly-past-it parents, Ben, and…Charlie. He hadn’t changed—ten years had barely touched him. Charlie was like that faux-marble table: unweathered by events. Where on earth had he found Iso?
Effie’s own heartache had put a limit on how much joy she could feel for other people before tipping over into the sort of self-pity that razed everything in its path like a forest fire. She had been glad, after James had left, that he had waited until a little while after Lizzie had gotten engaged—that she had been able to enjoy her best friend’s happiness in a moment of sheer jubilance that was untainted by the state of her own love life.
Although, of course, the comparison had always been there, really—at every friend’s wedding, every engagement party, every ring-finger photo, every “I said yes” group message. James hadn’t wanted to get married, said it wasn’t for him. Who needed to be given a piece of paper that told them how they felt? Over time, Effie had persuaded herself that she didn’t want that piece of paper, either. That is, until Lizzie was in line for one.
Effie didn’t remember the engagement party very well; she had drunk too much in a way that had started out enthusiastic and become embittered. That night, when they got home, she had started a conversation with James that she expected to turn into a fight but instead had simply turned into a shrug of resignation. The next morning, he had told her they wanted different things. Shocked, with a stabbing headache and the all-too-familiar sense that she couldn’t quite remember what had happened the night before, she had tried to persuade him otherwise, had begged him to reconsider.
But he had gone, immune to her pleas. He had closed the door behind himself, and except for a series of tragically procedural texts around moving out, and a few apologies sent in response to her late-night calls (unanswered) and rambling messages (mortifying when read back the next morning), that was that.
Throughout the snotty cuddles, the hand-holding and the hair-stroking of those difficult first weeks, Lizzie had assured Effie that nothing had happened at the party, but Effie couldn’t deny the uncomfortable feeling that her oldest friend had seemed to be holding something back ever since.
Now Effie looked over at Lizzie’s familiar heart-shaped, freckled face, the ghost of worry playing across it almost imperceptibly. On her other side, Ben was still gazing at his phone, still scrolling through Iso’s archive of covetable lifestyle ephemera. Effie leaned into his solid, cotton-fresh frame to better scrutinize the pictures and left Lizzie, frowning into the window next to her, to her silent reflection.
—
It was what Effie’s father had always called “golden hour” by the time they arrived at the Oratoire de St. Eris. The turreted building, made of pale limestone, absorbed the warm orange of the late afternoon sun from its hilltop perch like a cat on a windowsill.
Beyond the driveway, cut into the hillside below it, steps led down toward a shimmering rectangle of pure cyan. The pool! Effie’s heart leaped even before her eyes were drawn from its crystalline depths to the landscape beyond. She tilted her body left and then right to take in the panorama, and ran one hand through her flyaway hair as it lifted slightly in a sultry but welcome breeze.
For the first time in months, she felt she was on neutral ground, a new place and a blank slate: somewhere that had never witnessed her in any state other than how she was right now. Her home city, her regular haunts, the school, even her flat—they all still held traces of her as she used to be, of her happy, of her in a couple. All of them were tainted by memories. Sometimes she felt she was wading against a current just walking down her local high street; already here she felt unburdened by her own sad history.
Enough of that. Effie would leave here one half of a new couple: a fresh start with a delightfully unmapped future ahead of them.
6. Lizzie
I still couldn’t believe I’d had to cancel our wedding.
We weren’t that kind of people; we were us. Reasonable and refined. Above the sort of brute transaction that pits terror against trust in return for silence. For cooperation.
The first time he threatened me, I thought it was a joke. A bad one. I couldn’t believe he would ever treat me like that, but then he did.
I couldn’t believe he had taken those photos either. Taken them, saved them, readied them to share at the click of a button with everyone I knew, and with even more I didn’t.
I’d never seen myself asleep before. I don’t think I’ll ever look that peaceful again; I certainly don’t sleep anymore.
I couldn’t believe that the thing that had made us so special together—the intimacy, the tangled limbs and pink cheeks, the private language of daylight on skin as the dawn interrupts—had become a weapon. Couldn’t believe a man I cared so much for—so much that my body had ached for him when he wasn’t near me—would do this to me. That was the first time I thought I was going mad, but not the last.
He said those images would become public property if I didn’t play along, didn’t do what he asked. So I did.
I kept him sweet. I smiled when I felt the hard pinch of fear in my gut. Laughed my way through the awkwardness and the nerves. Pretended it was normal, fine—told myself it would be. I chatted at dinner, never went to bed angry. Blurred out the reality and gave my life a gloss. From the outside, everything looked perfect.
I could teach that stunning influencer girlfriend a thing or two about filters.
