I fast-forward through this walk down memory lane, and through some footage of everyone arriving at the church. It’s glaringly obvious at this speed that one side of the congregation is full and the other very sparse. I know I was never the type to have a huge bunch of friends, but surely I hadsome? My parents are there, obviously—well, I can see Mum. Maybe Dad walked me down the aisle—such archaic patriarchalsymbolism. Teenage me was never going to allow that kind of thing in my future.
I slow the footage down when it gets to the procession into the church. Some strange woman walks in before me, in a bridesmaid dress. “Who’s that?” I ask Bree.
“Oliver’s sister.”
“But where are you?”
She takes my hand. Was she not invited?
I was already staggering from the idea of her not being the bridesmaid, but she wasn’t even there? It’s starting to dawn on me that maybe I haven’t been abandoned after all. Perhaps I was the one doing the abandoning. And if so, doesn’t it speak volumes for them that they’re here with me now?
The videographer has captured that classic moment when the groom first turns to see his partner at the foot of the aisle. Oliver was an incredibly good-looking man. Wildly good-looking. Surely he could have had any girl he wanted. An awful, anxious feeling begins to well in the pit of my stomach. Inferiority. Undeservedness.
I’m your best bet, Evie. Nobody else will ever love you like me.
Where did those words spring from? My stomach drops.
I focus on the screen. I can read my own face, even behind a veil. That smile is fake. That’s fear in my eyes. I must have known even then that this marriage wasn’t right for me, so why did I go through with it?
I feel sick as I watch myself promise to love him. Can’t anyone see the cry for help in my eyes?
“Until death do us part …” I promise. Well, it’s done that, now, hasn’t it? And, like clockwork, I seem to have stopped loving him. This soon after the funeral, I think a widow ismeant to be screaming into the void, aching for her love to be returned.
It’s irrelevant, anyway. I suspect I stopped loving Oliver long before our car crash. Perhaps even before the wedding, the way I look in this footage. What I’m watching on the screen is not the fairy tale it’s striving to be, and no amount of cleverly put together pew decorations or Instagram-worthy color-coding could salvage that. I’m gobsmacked nobody picked it up at the time. How much of my life was a lie?
I can’t watch any more of this. My stomach is churning. I fast-forward through to the reception instead, hoping to catch a glimpse ofanyoneimportant to me.
But that’s when I land on the speeches.
70
Drew
When I summon the courage to enter the house, Evie and Bree are trawling through her god-awful wedding reception. Obviously, I wasn’t invited. Just seeing footage of my father and the way he idolized my brother sends blood pumping erratically through my veins. Oliver was always glued to that pedestal.
Strangely enough, this video is the first time I’ve watched Evie with Oliver without that familiar, gut-punching envy that’s haunted me since we were at school. She does not look at him the way a bride should look at a groom. I’m fascinated. Behind the poise and the immaculate hair and makeup and that perfect dress, she’s clearly as empty and miserable as I was that day. Just for a different reason.
“On behalf of my wife and I …” Oliver begins, and everyone groans at the well-worn speech opener.
“Not like you to allow a man to speak for you,” Bree observes.
Evie squirms. “None of this is anything like me, obviously. What was Ithinking?”
The sensible perspective she seems to have now is so at odds with the way she was then. Everything I knew leading up to this, from the moment she first met him, never made any senseto me. Her prickliness whenever I floated the idea that perhaps the relationship wasn’t brilliant for her. The jumpiness whenever we were hanging out and her phone would ring. It was clear from the start how wrong the dynamic was, but the more any of us criticized it, the harder she defended it.
Now it’s my father’s turn to bore everyone senseless with his gushing, Oliver-centric monologue. “There are few things in life that have brought me more pride over the years than my blond-haired, young, clever boy.”
“As distinct from his dark-haired son?” I say under my breath, unable to disguise the bitterness.
Evie pauses the video. Rewinds. And repeats that section. “‘My blond-haired, young, clever boy.’ That’s very odd,” she says.
“Not really. He’s always simpered over the Golden Child.”
“No, that speech pattern,” she says, hitting the mute button. “The adjectives are out of whack.”
“Is this one of your weird forensic linguistics things?” Bree ribs her. She’s not actually mocking Evie’s degree. We both always found her thoughts on this stuff fascinating.
“There’s a natural pattern to adjectives in the English language,” she tells us. “We don’t learn it at school, we just know it instinctively. It’s ‘big red ball,’ not ‘red big ball.’”
