A pause.
“That’s why I’m ready to make the ultimate commitment—finally.” He’d smiled into the creased cotton he lay on, reached a hand out toward her cheek, and then…
Then Effie had begun the jerky, guttural shoulder twerk that was the prologue to a day’s worth of alcohol leaving her system with abrupt and unannounced force. She had run into the en suite and bid adieu to it and to her dignity both, although it was nothing Charlie hadn’t seen before—as he had told her, in fact, while he’d patted her back and stroked her hair.
“You will be happy again, Eff,” he murmured as she retched with such intensity that her bony knees scraped the floor and she thought her heart was breaking all over again.
“You’re ready to be happy again, you just haven’t realized it yet. And you’ll meet someone who sees how brilliant you are.” He smiled at her when she next surfaced from within the porcelain bowl.
Charlie handed her a square of loo roll for her stinging eyes and runny nose. Though her insides burned as though they’d been sandpapered, Effie felt like she had evacuated six months of cumulative misery as she caught her breath and calmed her sobs on the cold tile floor next to the loo.
“Thank you,” Effie said to him. The six-foot, emotionally repressed man-child she’d first met when they were both eighteen had turned Tin Man, had finally discovered that there was a heart in there all along. “So, when are you going to pop the question?”
“Final night of the holiday, I thought.” He grinned. “But Christ, Eff, don’t ever mention this soppy conversation again or I’ll kill you.”
Charlie helped her up off the floor and sat her on the side of the bed with a tall glass of water. “You need to get some sleep. You look terrible.”
He turned to the door. “Oh, and you’re covered in sick, so you might want to take those clothes off before you climb in.”
Oh.
If Effie’s skin had already felt tight with the various mortifications she had inadvertently put herself through recently, it shrank another few sizes, in those moments watching Ben study his newly emptied phone, as the latest humiliation sank in.
Christ, you idiot.
Charlie hadn’t been weird with her or flirting with her—or, rather: he had been both, because that was what he always was with everyone. Although Effie’s capacity for overthinking, for overanalyzing, for obsessing, for—let’s not beat around the bush—near-total narcissism was in the moment of realization shocking to her, she was able to see the calamitously clownish elements in it too. Doing so came as a relief, in fact, an antidote to some of the dread she felt she had been drenched with since the drunken wedding night.
The tears rolling down her cheeks were, for the first time in six months, not entirely unhappy, but they acted as a sort of catharsis for everything else inside her. Her emotions had existed so close to the surface for so long, they needed little encouragement to break through. From punch bag to punch line, she thought, and realized—with a force that made her laugh aloud—that she couldn’t wait to tell Anna and Lizzie.
“Oh my God, Charlie,” she blurted, and her blush was instinctive rather than embarrassed. Effie had never felt more tenderly toward him. “I’m so sorry I was sick all over you.”
60. Anna
“Dan, why didn’t you answer your phone?” Anna asked the man whose gaze was now firmly—hopefully—fixed on Lizzie.
“I thought I’d lost it somewhere when I was moving my stuff out,” he replied. “But now I’m not so sure that someone didn’t nick it.”
Bertie scowled at Ben. “You sent the email to Marie about setting up the wedding from Dan’s account, didn’t you?”
Ben shrugged, his expression deliberately provocative with surly boredom; Lizzie threw him a withering look that he reeled with. She clasped Iso’s arm tightly in thanks, then paced uncertainly over to where Dan stood.
“So you were just pretending to make those calls?” Iso shrieked at Ben. “I knew you were lying about getting reception by the pool! I tried over there for HOURS!”
Lizzie had reached Dan and stood, a supplicant in bare feet, one hand on his dusty, tear-stained face, the other reaching for the fingers she might once have slipped a ring onto.
“I’m so so sorry,” she murmured. “Can you forgive me?”
He looked at her through filmy, sad eyes and shook his head.
Anna could see that he had felt in the past week every single emotion he thought could possibly exist, from anguish and despair to shame and contempt, and finally gut-wrenching regret, pulse-quickening fear. Now, the drag of pity, of empathy for how she had suffered. It had weighed so heavy on his heart as he had traveled across the Channel and the length of a country to find her that Dan thought he might have accidentally left it behind him in London, beating feverishly in the flat they had shared. He looked utterly drained, emotionally and physically wrung out, and he leaned into Lizzie as though he were losing blood.
“There’s nothing to forgive,” Dan whispered to her. “I just wish you’d told me, so I could have helped you fix it. You’re mine—remember? Mine to love, comfort, honor, and all that.”
The others blushed and tried not to watch too conspicuously as he grabbed her in a hug and a kiss that was mainly sweat and travel rime accumulated on this last-minute dash to France. Dust from the road had stuck to the tears drying on his cheeks.
There was a beat of stillness, and then Charlie turned toward Ben. The focus of all the accusations, now a target for all their resentment, their outrage. Their loyalty.
“That was really shitty behavior,” he drawled ominously.
Oh no, don’t fight. Anna’s intestines shriveled at the spectacle of it, two posh boys in fisticuffs outside a luxury holiday rental as though they were
