‘Of course everyone on the crew’s competent. But they’re not…’
Lily dug her thumb in again. ‘They’re not what?’
I exhaled, twisting around on the couch to look at her. ‘They’re all competent,’ I said, ‘but they’re not you.’
She blinked.
Once.
Twice.
Then, ‘I should get back to the Villa,’ she said. ‘The other Juliets are probably wondering where I am.’
I couldn’t begin to quantify how much work I had to do. I didn’t have a single minute to spare.
But I sat there for several long moments after she walked away, missing her so badly it was like an iron band around my chest.
I finally got to bed just after midnight, collapsing onto the thin mattress of my trailer bed and doubling up the lumpy pillow under my head.
The one-on-one time with the Dylans hadn’t been a disaster. They were two extremely likeable, telegenic people. Their conversation didn’t have any awkward silences. They made each other laugh. And they both responded well to instruction. If I said ‘jump’, they would both ask for specific details around how high and whether they should hold hands.
But Lily was right. The spark – that magical, ineffable chemistry – just wasn’t there.
And no matter how many cheeseboards she put together for me… realistically, I had no one to help me fake it.
… and now I never would again.
I adjusted my pillow again and checked my phone. Yes, I had remembered to set my alarm for 5am for the Convent friend shoot. That gave me almost five uninterrupted hours to sleep.
I didn’t, though. One eye open, one eye closed, I scrolledthrough my photos until I found the one I was looking for.
I never looked at the photos of my wedding anymore. Even though Julia and I had split amicably and she was still one of my closest friends, looking at pictures of our wedding seemed like an odd thing to do. They were full of the symbolic codes of love, the visual language of romance, and that wasn’t who we were to each other anymore.
There was one photo, though, that I looked at all the time.
It was from before the ceremony, when I was getting ready. My groomsmen were in the background, boutonnieres pinned to their lapels. I was standing in the foreground, as my best man did my tie up for me.
There you go,Lily had said, smoothing my tie down and tucking it into my waistcoat.Let’s go get you married.
She’d smiled up at me. In that moment, my feet had been very, very cold.
But I’d worn that same suit when she married Jeff, when I stood up at my best friend’s wedding the way she’d stood up for me. It was a different tie this time – bright yellow, like a sunflower, so I could match Thuong and the other bridesmaids – but the picture her photographer had snapped was almost exactly the same: Lily, in her wedding dress, tying my tie and tucking it into my waistcoat.
Let’s go get you married,it had taken everything in me to say to her.
Lily Ong was the love of my life. I had known that for a long, long time. I didn’t know quite when it had started – long enough ago that it made me feel disloyal to Julia, certainly, although I hadn’t realised just how deep my love for Lily went during our marriage – but now, it was afundamental, unchangeable truth about myself. I had dark hair that was turning grey, I was addicted to coffee, and I was in love with Lily.
We were never going to be together. I’d known that for almost as long. She’d never felt like that about me, and we were probably too similar to be functional anyway.
But it didn’t matter. I didn’t need to live with her or sleep with her or share finances with her to love her. As long as she was beside me – as long as we were still a team – so what if part of me was always going to be pining for her? No one said that the love of your life had to be a romantic one.
I had missed her so much this past year. Respecting her desire to go no-contact while she grieved was one of the most difficult things I’d ever done. The longing for her to come back had been almost unbearable. It felt like someone had cracked open my skull and ripped out half my brain and forgotten to sew me back together again.
I had never anticipated that seeing her again would somehow be worse.
I traced the line of Lily’s face in the photo with my finger. There were two familiar pangs in my heart.
One of pain.
