Four days later, I met Dan in a bare-bricked, bare-bulbed wine bar of the sort people less jaded than me enjoy going to and taking selfies in, and I loved him right from the off.
He made the familiar seem cozy rather than mundane, showed me in his own quiet way that there didn’t need to be some breathtakingly dramatic backdrop, some out-of-the-ordinary set of circumstances. Real life was enough if what was at the heart of it was sturdy and good.
That was when I should have sent the message. The next time Ben got in touch to ask what I was doing, where I was—invariably in bed as I caught up on messages after another weekend spent with Dan—and whether I’d like to send him another picture. But I didn’t.
I enjoyed chatting with him. He was clever, he made me laugh and squirm and feel like that girl in the sky instead of the one back behind a desk in Soho. I thought Dan was wonderful, but we were two weeks, three weeks, four weeks in—I’d been on enough dates before to know that, after any night out with Dan, there was still a high chance that he would simply drift off the radar, never text me back, blank my attempts to get in touch with him. With Ben, though, there had been what some people (not me: too jaded) might have called “a connection.”
I knew I had a propensity to breathlessness over this sort of thing—God knows I had learned that much along with literature and rhetoric at Cambridge—but, over the month or so since I’d been back, my brain had started referring to Ben as the One. I was counting the days, the hours, until my plane took off and I would see him again.
Until I wasn’t. Ben and I celebrated a month since we’d met with a meal over FaceTime—lunch for me and dinner for him—but a week later, he stopped responding to my texts. It didn’t seem like a big deal at first—he was busy at work, he’d told me—but then I didn’t hear from him for full weekends at a time. Weekends I was now spending mostly with Dan.
When I’d check in with Ben the following Monday, he either couldn’t take my calls or seemed distracted. Then five weeks, six weeks, seven weeks with Dan—finally I sent the message when, after two months of being together most days and most nights, Dan told me that he loved me.
“Ben, I’m so sorry but I’ve met someone and I think he might be the real deal.”
It was two days before my plane took off, and I knew then that I wouldn’t be on it when it did.
At first he was jocular, mock indignant down the line: “There aren’t any skyscrapers as tall as mine in London.”
Then a little hurt, and almost persuasive. But, when I didn’t budge, he was short. Terse and sharp.
“Fine then, have a great life.”
I felt bad letting him down, but he clearly had a busy schedule out there and I’d been clinging to him through my phone the way I had with Guy before him. With Dan I was out in the world, smelling and tasting it like a whole, present person. A happy person. Someone with a future.
That, I thought, was the end of our story—until, of course, I turned the page on the most exciting chapter of the new one I was telling.
42.
Effie
The library was still dark and cool, the night air not yet chased away. After Anna pulled Lizzie into the room, Effie closed the solid door carefully and stood, sad to feel awkward among her closest companions and unsure how to interact with either of them.
Anna seemed so cold, and Lizzie…Lizzie seemed as though she were on another planet, either with fear or the sheer unrecognizable, unreachable remoteness that so often veiled her features these days. They had barely spent any time alone together as a three so far this trip, and even now as they stood together, Lizzie still seemed to be somewhere else, far, far away behind features so closed they might as well have been the château’s studded and impregnable front door.
If Ben was the man she had come home from Thailand so hung up on, what Anna had seen made even more sense. Perhaps it was his arrival, and the revelation of what had gone on between him and Lizzie, that had tipped Dan from supportive fiancé to jealous, coercive bully.
“Right.” Effie felt a pulse behind her eye begin to flicker like a faulty connection. “Lizzie, you need to explain yourself. Is Ben Bangkok?”
Lizzie slumped as if the air had been drawn out of her with bellows. “Yes,” she said simply.
Effie knew her friend’s talent for self-justification, but her skin had grown thick to it over the years. Lapses in judgment, moments of thoughtlessness—these were forgivable along the bumpy and uneven road female friendships often take, but all-out betrayal would be hard to bounce back from.
“Anna saw you, Lizzie,” Effie continued. “On the wedding night. With Ben.”
No space for ambiguity: time for answers.
“We had to discuss something,” Lizzie replied quickly. “It was to do with the wedding and all the stuff that arrived. I thought he had canceled lots of it, I wanted to know what happened…”
But the words tumbled into the vacuum like snow onto a wet pavement; there was nothing for them to stick to, nothing to keep them solid or real, and they melted away.
When Effie spoke again, her voice splintered just as her throat did under the crushing realization of what Lizzie’s next answer might mean for their friendship.
“You have got to tell me what’s going on, Lizzie,” Effie demanded, almost breathless with the weight of tears held back. “Are you and he…Are you…Have you been cheating on Dan with Ben? Are you two together?”
The air Lizzie hadn’t been able to breathe in moments ago whooshed out of her now instead, and as her frame sagged, Anna’s grip seemed to be the only thing holding her up on the thin legs beneath her nightgown.
“Yes,” she said, not without difficulty. “That’s right.”
Effie staggered backward and leaned her weight against a sturdy wooden writing desk; she felt shame all over her, an extra layer she was now forced to wear despite the heat. She had either been Ben’s means of making the bride-to-be jealous or a fig leaf for the two of them to hide their illicit relationship for as long as it took Lizzie and Dan to say their vows.
“I look…I look…like such a fool,” she whispered, and then louder, as if the words had been ripped from her: “How could you do this to me?”
Lizzie threw her a look like a plea. She began to vibrate where she stood in a teeth-chattering tremble from head to foot so intense she could barely stand still. It was the first time Effie could remember not rushing to Lizzie’s aid when her friend needed her to, and she felt the beginnings of a fissure in her heart that she didn’t know how to stop.
I don’t owe you anything anymore.
Anna’s face, too, had closed like shutters on a shop; she looked pained. The air seemed to gain in density, harder and thicker to breathe in, as though it were curling around their ankles like mist instead, and there was a collective shifting of weight in the room as the women braced themselves for the impact of whatever came next.
“After everything we’ve been through,” Effie said quietly, though her voice began to rise like a plane readying its engines for takeoff. “After everything I did for you!”
Then a noise, behind them. The heavy door opening. A sweep of rubber sole on tile, the clearing of a throat.
Ben stepped into the library. “I think I know what you’re talking about,” he began earnestly. “And we owe it to Effie to come clean—about us.”
He lingered on the end of the last word like a snake with its hiss, and Lizzie’s mouth formed a straight line of pearly teeth and anger in response.
“Fine!” she choked. “Fine, let’s have it all out in the open.”
Ben approached her, hands outstretched and tenderness in his eyes—directed at Lizzie, Effie thought bitterly. Only at Lizzie.
“Do you want to tell it,” he asked gallantly, “or shall I?”
43.
Lizzie
Trapped again. Boxed in by l
ies—only this time, they were mine. I’d had to lie to Effie to stay one step ahead; I knew I needed to be on the front foot from now on if I were to have any chance of stopping Ben.
But, my God, with the two women who knew me best staring at me like we’d never met before—and the knowledge that, soon enough, he’d have me cornered again—I couldn’t see how I’d ever manage to pull it off. I had to install one more roadblock between me and Effie—for the simple purpose of protecting her from herself.
From the truth, really. If that came out—if the photos did—that was the end of everything. Not for me, but for Effie.
So I walled us in further, bricked us up in Ben’s tangled story to protect us a little while longer—until I could work out what else I could do. I couldn’t risk the chance of Effie forcing him into the revenge he really wanted: a showdown in which the truth was revealed, and the pictures were too.
My mind grasped for a way to convey to Effie and to Anna that whatever words might be coming out of my mouth, they should be reading the silent scream behind my eyes instead. But the yarn Ben had spun was horribly, deliberately believable, and my behavior for the last six months so bizarre and aloof, I had given them no reason to doubt it.
“Ben and I met in Bangkok,” I said sullenly. “You probably remember me telling you about the date I went on there. And when I got home, I met Dan and I thought that was that.”
“But then—fate!” said Ben, eagerly picking up the thread, some grotesque happy-go-lucky look on his face. “Fate brought us together again at the engagement party. We had no idea of the link—and neither did Dan—but, when he found out…Well, you remember what I told you—this was the reason he became the way he did. I’m afraid me and Lizzie were the trigger.”
Effie shook her head and laughed bitterly, looking from his face to mine. Perhaps she was thinking he owed her nothing, but me…I owed her almost everything. My job, my happiness: the life I had woven for myself would never have happened without her help all those years ago. Now Ben was unpicking every last stitch of it.
When she spoke, her lip curled and the ugly contempt looked foreign on her usually mild features. “Then why, why, bring me into it? Why start something up with me, if you two were going to get back together?”
I closed my eyes and answered for him. “Because he didn’t know, Eff. I didn’t tell him about Dan’s behavior until last week, when I canceled the wedding. And I didn’t know about you two until a few days after that. Otherwise…Of course. I would never have knowingly let you get tangled up in all this.”
This much, at least, was true.
I saw Ben give a small nod at my performance—if it worked, Effie would at least be free of him by the end of tomorrow, when we all got home. Whether I would or not, I still had no idea—but I could tell that my best friend wouldn’t be around when I found out. I had seeded too much doubt along with the story Ben wanted me to tell her; the trust—that incredible, rare alchemy we had nurtured between us over the years—was gone.
“Right,” Effie said, pinching the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger. “Right.”
Anna swooped to embrace her with arms that I desperately wanted to feel around my shoulders, pressing me in toward the two of them, where I belonged. But the gesture spoke so loudly, she might as well have pushed me away with her other hand.
“I’ve always known you could be selfish, Lizzie,” Effie said. “And thoughtless in pursuit of your own happiness, your own gain. But I really thought I deserved more from you than this. After everything.”
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, i
n 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 spent alone, but for the ebb and flow of other course-mates through the college gates, at lunchtime, in the library. When she met up with Anna every evening, they went to the weekly film night as a twosome or shared a bottle of wine, then went to bed. The following day brought still no Lizzie.
They were not worried so much as intrigued. Lizzie texted them constantly with updates: the man she had met was not gown, a student, but town, a—as Lizzie described him—“real person.” He was older than them, had a job, lived by himself in a small cottage on the outskirts of the city. She tackled our course’s reading list in his garden, having gotten the prescribed books out of a suburban library. She wrote up her study notes at his kitchen table, between cooking meals in an actual oven. In the student halls, their rooms had only two electric burners; on day four, Lizzie roasted a chicken.
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