The words would have been a slap in the face had they been true, but the fact that they so neatly cut across precisely the contortions I’d put myself through to spare Effie far worse—sacrificing my future, sending Dan away, boxing myself into a corner precisely because of what I owed her…Well, I felt as though I’d been skinned.
It emptied my final reservoirs of self-control not to scream it all out at her then. It might have felt good for a moment—righteously soaking up their sympathy and their horror, watching them direct it at the person responsible for all this, rather than his hapless victim—but what after that? Only the grinding and inevitable conclusion my brain had already reached at least a thousand times when I’d tried to riddle out my options before: Effie splashed across the internet, the end of her career, of all her dreams.
She and Anna swept out of the library, leaving me trapped in the center of Ben’s web. I wanted to stretch out a hand and beg their retreating backs to save me.
“Well done,” Ben said as the door swung closed behind them. “Very convincing.”
I could see that me having been out of his sight, even briefly beyond his control, had made him nervous. He needn’t have worried. The threat was still there, the sword over Effie’s head.
“She hates me,” I said.
Ben’s eyes shone with relief—and something else: triumph. “Good,” he said.
He had cut me off from everything—everybody—I held dear. He was all I had left, and now he was standing so close to me that I couldn’t see anything other than him.
44. Effie
Effie lay in the bedroom she had shared for only one night of the holiday—and even then in separate single beds—with the new boyfriend she had been so excited to introduce to her friends. Utterly humiliated, she consoled herself with the fact that he had ever looked twice at her at all, and it made her feel even more pathetic.
Stupid, really, to think that a man like that might be interested in a woman like her. The past month had all been a game, something to make Lizzie jealous. To bring her back to him, make her see what she was missing.
Of course.
Effie hadn’t cried when Anna had told her, carefully and gently laying out what she had seen on the wedding night as though she were dressing a wound. Her friend’s soothing voice had acted like a balm. But she cried now, after Lizzie had confirmed it—after everything they had been through together. Even after what Effie had done for her at university.
She thought of Ben downstairs with Lizzie. Ben, Dan’s best man, and Lizzie, her best friend, who deserved each other for the hurt their relationship had caused those on the periphery. Those who stood a chance of being hit by the shrapnel, burned by the heat given off when two people finally give in to the sexy, clandestine urges they have tried and failed to suppress.
Of course Dan was angry and very much on the warpath—he must have found out. Despite everything Ben had told them about the former groom, Effie struggled not to feel some kind of sympathetic kinship with him: he too had lost out to his closest friend.
“I saw them, I remember now—” Through the tears, Effie’s mind flicked fitfully back to the whirling of her panic attack in the cave, and her pulse followed suit.
“When?” Anna asked from where she sat on the bed, stroking Effie’s tear-soaked hair. “Where?”
“In the caves,” she replied. Amid the terror, Effie had seen, among the gruesome faces in the paintings spinning about her, Lizzie’s—white, accusatory—and her pointed finger stabbing at Ben’s chest. “They were fighting in there.”
“No wonder she was so keen to go,” said Anna. “It meant they could finally have a private chat without worrying the rest of us might overhear.”
Without his girlfriend noticing.
But no, Effie realized now: she had never been a girlfriend. Ben had never allowed her that far in. She’d never even been round to his flat—they had always been at hers, and he’d never left so much as a phone charger behind.
Effie cringed at the way she’d clung to Ben over the past few weeks, the way she’d hung so many of her sorrows and grievances on him, as though he were a coat stand, to relieve herself of them for a while. She was grateful, at least, that none of her friends had been there to witness her at her most lovestruck—in the pub, on Hampstead Heath, in bed. Oh God, in bed. Where he had made her feel more confident, more desirable, more extroverted than anyone ever had before.
She swallowed grimly and blinked away the visions of herself—laughing, beckoning, arranged—and with it some of the humiliation she felt accruing in her chest. What she was unable to shrug off was the sense of betrayal: Lizzie had neither told her anything about her and Ben, nor stopped Effie from going any further with him. But then Effie had not told Lizzie either, had she? Was it really possible Lizzie hadn’t known?
All of this made Ben the first secret they had had between them, the only secret. The bond they had forged playing dilettante during those fairy-tale days at Cambridge had been strengthened by what had happened in exam term. After that, Effie had never anticipated anyone or anything coming between her and Lizzie again.
It had been a Thursday, a weekly slice of disposable R&B at one of the many terrible student clubs, when Lizzie had disappeared from the dance floor. When the lights came up on the clinches and the debris, she simply wasn’t there anymore. Anna and Effie, first curious, then worried, had checked their phones and each found a message waiting from her: “Got very lucky, see you tomorrow.”
But they didn’t see her tomorrow, or the next day, or the one after that. Effie’s lecture-free days were
