Effie too watched Ben in violent disdain as he stood, ramrod straight, denying nothing.
Dan turned to his bride again. “There was only one photo of you, Lizbet,” he said, then turned again to his oldest friend. “I deleted it and all the others too.”
Though her head had been sunk in shame, Lizzie now lifted her face to her former fiancé. She seemed almost hopeful. “Only one…?”
“But there’s still this.” Her fiancé dug in his pocket and pulled out a portable hard drive wrapped in a jaunty orange case.
Anna could tell from Lizzie’s face that the other woman recognized the discovery of it as yet another betrayal. “You said you’d delete them completely,” she spat at Ben. “You’d already backed them up.”
“No matter,” Dan said simply. “We can delete these soon enough too.”
He spun where he stood and pitched it, the case glowing as it arced through the night sky before landing with a satisfyingly deep splash in the pool. The surface rippled crazily like a broken mirror, then began to settle back to calm once more.
A muscle spasmed in Ben’s cheek, the only indication that he had heard what Dan was saying or seen what his friend had just done. To Anna, he seemed to be trying not to laugh.
“Well, what a display,” he said sardonically. “Chivalry isn’t dead.”
Anna growled with anger at him. “Was it you who uncanceled the booze and the flowers and all those bloody chairs?”
Dan’s eyebrows rose. “What?”
“Did you leave the message in Bertie’s notepad?” asked Charlie, wide-eyed. “And the writing in the mirror?”
“Why did you even come here?” Lizzie whispered. “I did everything you asked.”
“Her,” Ben said unapologetically, his chin thrust out and a finger raised to Effie.
“Me?” she shrilled in response.
“You’d do anything for her. Anything to protect her,” Ben said to Lizzie sullenly. “She’s your weak spot.”
56. Effie
She pulled herself taller and tried to quiet the voice that kept telling her that of course it had all been a sham with Ben. A familiar dread began to nibble around her outline.
The pictures.
Of course he had never been attracted to her, because he looked the way he did and she looked the way she did.
He has pictures of me, too.
She’s your weak spot, Ben had said, and Effie’s voice was careful and calm despite it all: “I think we can safely say after this that there is nothing whatsoever about Lizzie that is weak.”
“Especially not Effie,” said Anna, a table’s width away, without even looking toward the man who had wronged them both but fixing both friends with an expression so fierce her face seemed to glow in the moonlight.
Effie reached out an arm to Lizzie, made to approach her with wet eyes.
“No, wait!” Lizzie’s voice was ragged, and she held up a hand to halt Effie’s progress, a plea to be heard. “There’s more, I’m afraid.”
She looked to each side, at Dan and then at Ben, her blond hair swinging wildly with each turn of her head. She had her arms raised at each of them, a tragic Greek pulled between two impossible choices.
“Ben had been blackmailing me with those photos,” she said. “But they weren’t the reason I canceled the wedding.” She paused for breath. “I didn’t care what he did to me.”
Lizzie looked up at the stars to clear the tears pooling in her eyes. “But I was so fucking…stuck. Eff, I’m sorry I lied to you about me and Ben, but I just couldn’t risk you having it out with him, because…because…” She blinked and breathed in deeply.
“Because?” Effie prompted, and felt her stomach plummet. Here it comes.
“Because he has photos of you too,” she finished, brokenly, her voice fading out like an old gramophone record.
Inside Effie’s head, the static cut out. The stillness in her brain and on the terrace felt even more oppressive than the usual feedback loops. A greasy block of terror began to form in her stomach, and her palms were suddenly slick with shame.
The pictures he took, and the ones I sent when he asked.
In the depths of her panic attacks these last months, she had spiraled with the worry that it would be details from one of the blurry nights that would reach out of the past, out from the blank spots in her memory, to claim her dignity. Instead it was a series of carefully posed, sharp-focused, ultra-high-definition decisions she had made while fully in control and only too conscious. She had been so hungry for affection—no, attention—that she had given everything away willingly. Her humiliation was complete.
One eyelid began to tremble as Effie thought of the girls—my girls—in their boaters, rucksacks bobbing behind them as they walked in line like little ducklings through the school gates at Coral Hill. Of the other teachers in the school: wholesome, reliable, steady. Of the parents, just about as well versed in worldly sin as the next highly paid metropolitan liberal but insistent that not a whisper of it should reach their children’s ears. It would be like the Spanish Inquisition, Effie thought; she would be hounded out of there less with pitchforks than with horrified expressions, muffled voices, all those pairs of eyes on her.
Where would she go then?
Effie’s thoughts flickered in her mind like a scratchy old black-and-white film, sped up for laughs: from the Prep, past the other schools with sparkling reputations, down past the ones where she could still make a difference, and to the bottom of the pile. Even there, an HR department would Google her name and stop short at the image search; any potential employer pausing to read the Post-it attached to her CV would crumple the whole thing straight into the wastepaper basket.
I will never be a headmistress. I will never get another job in education again.
“Oh my God,” she whispered and began to sob—with embarrassment at her own poor judgment and horror at its ramifications.
How could I have been
