I sighed. “Fine. I’ll marry Bridge and kill me too.” I looked between Priya and Andi. “And I’ll pass on the fucking because I’m dead.”
“Does that make me a widow?” asked Bridge. “I don’t want to be a widow.”
“It also makes you a polygamist,” Priya pointed out, “if you marry all of us.”
“Oh God.” Bridge twitched next to me. “Speaking of marriage, I need to call Tom.”
Oh Godwas right. Tom was going to completely kill me. He’d already married Bridge, was going to skip the fucking part, and would get straight to killing me dead. “Can you tell him I’m sorry?” I asked. “And also that this was totally your idea?”
Chapter 4
“You do realise,” Tom said, about two seconds after arriving in the waiting room of St. Thomas’s Hospital, “that I work with people who know how to make bodies disappear.”
Bridge had, in fact, told him that it was all her idea, but he didn’t seem to think that made a difference. And, to be fair, he was right. “I’m really sorry,” I said. “Really, really sorry. Really, really, really sorry.”
He rubbed his eyes with the weariness of a man who had been dragged out of bed at four-something-horrible in the morning because his wife had gone into labour on the Millennium Bridge because her arsehole best friend had been having a panic attack about a puppy. It was a remarkably specific kind of weariness. “I know you are. But I was kind of hoping you’d got past the stage of thinking that doing a shitty thing and feeling bad about it is the same as not doing a shitty thing in the first place.”
“I have.” I tried to be all dignified and taking responsibility and everything, but I felt about three inches tall and fourteen years old. “I just… I had a relapse.”
“Do you not understand how wrong this could have gone? You could have seriously hurt Bridge.”
Everyone in the waiting room, friends and strangers alike, was studiously looking away. Which I guess was better than filming itso they could post it to TikTok, called something likeWow as a Complete Stranger I Don’t Know What’s Going on Here but It’s Clearly Luc’s Fault.
“She insisted,” I protested. “What was I supposed to say? No?”
“Yes. You were supposed to say no.”
“Itried.”
“You should have tried harder. What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I mean, do you want the list—”
“No, I don’t want the list. Look, I”—apparently rubbing his eyes wasn’t sufficient to cope with me, so Tom had progressed to rubbing his whole head—“it’s not for me to decide who Bridge is friends with or what those friendships look like. But, fuck me, Luc. Being slightly less of a liability than you used to be still makes you a liability.”
I had literally no answer for that. Because it was sort of true and sort of not true at the same time, and it didn’t seem productive to get into a debate about my personal growth with an ex-boyfriend who was married to my best friend, who we were both extremely worried about.
“Look,” he said again, still rubbing, but making a visible effort to not despise me. “I’m…sorry. I’m upset and I’m tired and I need to be with Bridge.”
“I never meant to get in the way of that.”
“I know. But, somehow, you always do.”
I literally had no answer for that either, but I didn’t need one because Tom had left.
“Wow,” said Andi. “That was the sort of life experience I’m glad I got to see from the outside.”
Somewhere out in the ether there was a comeback I could have given that was arch yet humble in a way that would make me seem cool, despite having just received the third-worst dressing-down I’dever had in my life. Unfortunately,somewherewas nowhere near me, so I just said, “Thanks. I feel incredibly comforted.”
I was aiming forplayful, but I must have overshot and landed inpissy, because Priya gave me an exasperated look and said, “You know, I was going to say something nice about how Tom didn’t really mean it and he’s married to Bridge so he must know what she’s like, but since you’re continuing to handle this whole situation like a dickhead, you’re on your own.”
“Hang on, why does Tom get a crisis pass but I don’t?”
“Because you caused the crisis.”
“I just want to say,” I said ill-advisedly, “as a feminist,” I added, even more ill-advisedly, “that putting all this on me is stripping Bridge of, like, agency and shit. She was instrumental in this crisis.”
Andi shifted uncomfortably on her blue plastic chair. “I’m beginning to think we should play fuck, marry, kill again.”
