“I know what he’s like about stuff like this,” Ben continued in the dark of the cloakroom. “He’s the kind of guy that wouldn’t be able to get past it—not with me.”
I knew that Dan was a thoughtful sort of guy—far more thoughtful than anybody else I’d ever been with. I knew he was a considerate sort of guy, too. If being a bit jealous was the flip side of those qualities…Well, we all have our flaws, I told myself.
“No, of course,” I said. “I see. Let’s just leave it, it was nothing.”
Ben’s features tightened briefly. “That’s right,” he said firmly. “Nothing.”
Nevertheless, I felt a cold tide rising from my velvet-clad feet. I swayed slightly where I stood, hemmed in by the dimensions of the room, of Ben in front of me, of things I had done before I had even met Dan. I’d never wanted the man who would be my husband to feel anything but admiration and love for me. I certainly didn’t want to ruin what we had or the friendship he’d shared with Ben since they were both eleven.
He put a hand on my shoulder and looked deep into my eyes, so far that I felt I was standing there in front of him naked. Again.
“That’s why I won’t tell him,” he said, with a sad, regretful smile playing around his white lips. “I won’t tell him about all those texts you sent me,” he added, with a doleful flourish. “Even though you two lovebirds had met by then, I think?”
Cold, cold, cold from my head to my toes.
I had spoiled the purest thing I had ever had before I’d even said, “I do.”
47. Effie
Effie felt pathetic to have pinned her hopes on him. Pathetic to have staked her happiness on another relationship. Pathetic to have handed Ben her baggage, and yet somehow relieved to know now without a doubt that he wasn’t capable of carrying it for her. She was just going to have to learn to shoulder life all by herself.
That, Effie hoped, was how she might begin to feel comfortable in her own skin, relaxed in her own company. How she had reached her thirties and still didn’t—when everyone else seemed innately to understand that acquiring this sort of self-reliance was a large part of becoming a grown-up—she couldn’t explain. But she had the sense that Ben—and Lizzie, Effie remembered again lurchingly—had taken away her final excuse for not learning.
Effie had attached her self-esteem to so many other people over the years that it had lost its stick; now, rather than leave it lying in the dust after Ben’s departure from her life, she’d pick it up and treasure it for herself. Nurture it like the girls she did at school, like the friends she had counseled round pub tables over the years—women so bright and full of potential she’d be shocked to find them staying in a relationship that wasn’t good enough for them just for the sake of a bit of company. For the sake of feeling wanted.
From now on, Effie would start taking her own advice.
Her bitterness over Ben and Lizzie’s affair had already begun to balance with the sense of having been handed a reprieve.
Plus, there were the niggles she had felt since he had arrived among her nearest and dearest, and the air between the two of them had changed. The growing feeling that, as pleasant a distraction as Ben had been from the everyday business of heartbreak, this might be all he ever was. Beyond the pub, beyond the bedroom, Effie never quite knew what to say to him, how to act around him—as though the self she had been with Ben was one she could not also be in front of her friends.
At least the guilt of something possibly having happened with Charlie was dissipating with every passing minute since the realization that she had meant nothing to Ben—although pain at the fact that she had meant just as little to her best friend was filling the space that guilt had vacated.
Lizzie could have Ben if she wanted him—only, who would want a man who had slept with her best friend to make a point?
One who had been victimized by the man she was supposed to marry.
Effie’s anger was tempered by the revelations about Dan; that sort of constant domestic trauma—a regular pulse of fear beating out the rhythm of every single day—explained so much of her friend’s behavior over the past six months and why Ben had so doggedly lingered outside Lizzie’s closed door, in case the man who had waged his campaign of cruelty against her turned up to claim his prize. Effie shivered, despite the golden sunshine.
The household had disintegrated, the strain on its fabric too much to bear, and the cozy if rather disquieted ambience in the château had ripped apart. The rest of them had skulked awkwardly outdoors, where the pool stretched out, still and glassy, in blue magnificence. Just the sight of it lifted Effie’s spirits; her tears had dried and sunglasses hid her inflamed red eyes, but her brain remained trained on Lizzie.
If Dan’s treatment of his fiancée had been what brought his best man and his bride-to-be irrevocably closer than they had once been, why hadn’t Lizzie admitted it sooner? Fear? Shame? The exhilaration of secrecy? Effie had certainly experienced the potency of the latter in the last month. If things had resumed between the two of them only in the week since Lizzie had canceled the wedding, it made the deception slightly
