“Why it’s always some dreadful pasta dish swimming in oil and courgettes if you don’t like the meat selections is unfathomable to me,” Miranda groused to me across the dinner table, spearing one of the hated vegetables and stuffing it between her bright pink lips. “I can’t abide chicken dijon, and that beef tenderloin is not nearly rare enough.”

After the chest-puffing and macho posturing Alex and Julian had treated us to during the cocktail hour, quite wisely the Terrible Ten (less Jamie, up at the head table) paid no attention to our seating assignments, which Bex must have cooked up with her new husband for maximum awkwardness. I was supposed to perch between Julian and Alex, with Minty flanking Alex’s other side, and Amanda on Julian’s. Sasha had been seated across the room with the one man I ever knew her to have had sex with, Rich Pfeffer. I remember meeting him at an art history department drinks thing, where he introduced himself as, “Rich by name, rich by offshore accounts.” He was awful then, and encroaching middle age seemed to have blessed him with what I guessed to be a 44-inch waistline, a permanent slick of sweat on his brow, and an abiding interest in “turning you back to men, Sasha old girl.” Charlie was abandoned with a table of hypochondriac Fairleigh and Smith relations, all asking if it wouldn’t be too much to ask for a quick consult. Miranda and Will may have had each other to cling to, but their dining companions were distant cousins of Ruth Fairleigh, two grande dames who were inveterate matchmakers, and had been informed by the groom that the old friends just needed a nudge towards the altar.

Instead, we’d resorted and regrouped, with Minty, Julian, Amanda and Charlie (taking one for the team) at one table, and the rest of us at another across the dance floor. Not that the distance seemed to do much to lower the heat simmering between the factions. I watched Julian, steak knife clutched downwards, stab repeatedly at his tenderloin, eyes narrowed while he kept close tabs on Alex’s movements. Amanda valiantly whoopsie!-rubbed her bosom against Jules’ shoulder to distract him, but Alex’s refusal to return the black look only tightened Julian’s focus. No, I could tell Alex was half-listening to Will musing about a lateral move from indexed to active management, but mostly he was tapping out texts under the table.

“Who’s so fascinating you’d pass up a free meal?” I teased, passing my hand over his phone before giving his knee a squeeze.

After a long sigh of exasperation, Alex shoved his phone back in his pocket. “It’s my mum, being rather too dramatic for her own good. I’d rather not let it spoil what we have left of this travesty.”

I nodded, sliding another bite of the (actually quite good, thank you, Miranda) chicken dijon in my mouth. Julian caught my eye briefly when I returned Charlie’s good-natured wave from across the room; thirty seconds later, my own phone buzzed with an incoming text.

Once a cheater always a cheater. Who’s it this time? It can be our little secret, just between old friends

I tapped out a response to Julian along the lines of “eat shit and die” but shut my screen off instead.

“Whoozat texting you two?” Sasha slurred to my left. Somewhere between freshening up a sobbing Minty and the main course she’d managed to dump rather more alcohol in herself than I’d noticed. She’d swept her honey blonde hair into a makeshift chignon, speared by a rose she’d plucked from the centerpiece. Being Sasha, her air was that of a woozy, slightly wilting party girl at 4am in Studio 54 circa 1977 — like a far blonder Bianca Jagger, sans horse (of course).

Alex held his phone up. “My mum. My sister has ‘disappeared’ — highly doubt it. Probably fucked off to Edinburgh to see Frances again and turned off her phone. Don’t blame her, Mum would be happier if she could stick a GPS up Fenn’s arse.”

Make that two covert lushes — I detected the tell-tale slushy Scots-lite in Alex’s voice. Since he’d moved to the Bay Area, I’d seen the fully loaded, high-octane drunk Alex of the past precisely one time. His old schoolmate Piers had reached out on Facebook to ask if he could crash one night on a layover between Toronto and Tokyo. I’d Ubered over from Berkeley to satisfy mutual curiosity — I wanted to hear stories about a schoolboy Alex from someone who wasn’t Julian, and Piers just had to meet the Yoko Ono who’d broken up the band. When I abandoned ship just before midnight, Piers and Al had ploughed through three bottles of a quite decent Napa red and had moved on to singing Atomic Kitten’s “Whole Again” at full volume, bringing on the wrath of Ms. Bob again through the thin common wall.

Not that I was feeling particularly compos mentis myself — between the brandy and the whisky in the flask and the Poison Appletinis and the champagne and the sauv blanc Minty made me drink and the chenin blanc I was sipping at between bites of chicken, I was decidedly not sober. Pickled enough that later, when Alex and Will bumbled off to explore the dessert station (because wedding cake hadn’t been enough, clearly), it occurred to me that showing Miranda and Sasha Jules’ text was a fantastic idea.

“That little shit!” Miranda seethed. “You should go over there, San, give him what for. S’isn’t about Alex, s’bout you.” She stifled two hiccups behind one of Miss K’s — Kathryn’s — handkerchiefs.

“To be fair though, she did kind of cheat on him. I mean, the first time,” Sasha clarified, raising an index finger to make the point. “Jules didn’t dump you at that party, and then that very night you slink off with Al, very hush-hush.”

“Why did he have to dump me for it to be over?” I shot back. “In my mind, I wanted it to be over.” On the west side of the barn, I watched as Will and Alex plucked from a table festooned with burgundy and gold roses handfuls of chocolate bon-bons to chuck in each other’s mouth with varying degrees of success.

“Fair point,” Sasha conceded, tapping her spoon — bickbickbick — on the rim of her espresso cup, not that the coffee was sobering her up. “S’pose it’s really Al who’s the cheater then. Weren’t you still fucking him back then, Ran?”

Miranda followed my line of sight to where the two old friends were now huddled over Will’s phone, laughing over… a photo? A meme? A text? “Why does anyone still care about it?” She dismissed the notion with a brisk flick of the wrist. “Such a long time ago.”

“Any chance I can butt in?” Charlie’s voice echoed over my shoulder before he blundered half-cocked into Alex’s now-empty seat next to me. Despite his slightly dishevelled appearance (cowlick firmly up, tie askew) and faint whiff of wine, he appeared to me a harbor of sanity and relative sobriety amongst this lot. “Sorry to crash the party. Jules has Min and Man hanging on his every word about his flat in LA and his trip to the Maldives last month, and honestly, I don’t really give a monkey’s.” He went to give a tug to his cuffs, only to seemingly recall he’d rolled them up.

Miranda reached forward to straighten his tie but got a sharp swat in return. “Heavens, Charles. Hardly reasonable, just fussing.”

“Do you ever think what it all might have been like if we hadn’t all been drawn together?” Charlie was summoning Alex and Will’s attention with a bright bleat of a whistle and a stiff, beckoning wave. “Different friends, different paths, you know.”

From a small dais decorated to look like a hay bale, the DJ tapped his microphone sharply, the echo bouncing from the high rafters down onto the gleaming dancefloor. “Grab a glass of champagne — it’s almost time for Mr. and Mrs. Fairleigh’s first dance!”

“Miserable, just miserable,” Miranda scoffed while we watched Will and Al wend their way through the tables, stopping only for Will to commandeer a tray of filled champagne glasses from a startled waiter. “We’re pretty bloody awful, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“Me neither,” Sasha said, grabbing a glass from the tray Will offered.

Jamie and Bex burst hand in hand through a cheering crowd, lit by a peachy spotlight. Bex had changed from her poofball of tulle into a knee-grazing sheath shimmering with thousands of beads and sequins; her dark honey skin glowed under the amber glow of the light. Her mouth curved with unabashed glee at carrying off the coup of jumping head first into the moneyed classes while giving everyone the middle finger and a raspberry for good measure. To the strains of Chet Baker’s “Let’s Get Lost,” Jamie lifted his wife high, high to the rafters, with a grin so electrically bright he might have lit the whole barn.

“To love!” Al cheered, tapping his glass on each of ours in turn.

“To love!” we crowed in return, even though we all knew love’s often a gamble that’s a complete sucker’s game.

***

As I said before, it really was all Miranda’s fault. While the others swarmed the dancefloor, wiggling out of suit jackets and casting high heels aside to shimmy and dad-dance, I chose to seethe near one of the bars, picking at a pumpkin spice macaron. Perfect for keeping an eye on Miranda, whose hand strayed onto Al’s arse more than once (to be fair, he did slap her hand, both times). Perfect for spying on Jules, still one of the best on the tiles when he wasn’t giving Amanda a dental checkup with his tongue.

You should go over there. Give him what for.

For what? I asked the phantom Miranda.

Wasn’t cheating, none of the times and you know that. What’s a kiss anyway?

It wasn’t just a kiss, none of the times, and you know that, I admitted to myself.

Do it. Do it, Phantom Miranda and the champagne chanted.

The chant and the booze buoyed me to a far corner of the barn where I’d seen Amanda lead Julian by his burgundy tie a minute before, and I sailed on the current of blood red rage, a scarlet river that roiled my thoughts even more. It was like being an automaton, a wind-up toy tottering in heels, gripping a glass of Billecart-Salmon. That this was a terrible idea nipped at me, but I swept it aside as I bore down on my target.

“Melissa, darling,” Jules crowed, throwing wide his arms for an embrace before Amanda wedged herself between us and wrapped herself in the hug meant for me, if I’d wanted it. (Which I was fairly certain I didn’t.) “Thought you’d never come by to say hello, though I suppose this is hard to watch for a divorcee.”

“Not nice,” Amanda warned, craning her neck to dab a kiss on his jawline. “Play nice, Jules. You promised.”

“HA!” I brayed, pressing a finger into his still-crisp white dress shirt hard enough to make him wince. “His promises are worth shit, Amanda. Know what he promised me?”

Amanda shook her deep red curls slowly while Julian’s green gaze singed me. Don’t fucking say it, he mouthed to me over her shoulder. No Fenn.

“He promised to love me, made a big fucking deal about how important being faithful is, prob’ly did t’same to you, huh?” God, I sounded drunk, but the words were propelling themselves faster than I could catch them. “You know why he accuses me of cheating on him? He’s the cheater. Don’t fucking deny it, Julian Cranford. I dunno how many there were but I knew, I knew.”

Deftly, Amanda wriggled out from Jules’ embrace to steady me — I was wobbling in an alcoholic fury. “Is this true?” she demanded of him with a stamp of her left Louboutin. “Did you cheat on her?”

“How many, Jules? How many?” I screamed. Amanda shushed me, waving Alex and Charlie over frantically to come collect the nasty little piece of baggage I was happily transmogrifying into. “I kiss Alex one time and how many women did you bang? How many did you fuck in our bed?”

I knew the look on Julian’s face well, far too well, his features expertly schooled in a placid mask to give away little, but the twitch of his left eye said it all for me. That I was humiliating Julian in front of Amanda only egged me on — more than anything else, he cannot abide being made to look something other than unflappable, a colossus astride the world. A man in control of himself and everything within his grasp.

“You little slut,” he rasped, reaching past Amanda to grab my wrist. The acrid tang of fear flooded my mouth; he’d tightened his grip on me like this so many times, never moving to strike me, oh no. No. Jules had never hit me, no slaps, no bites, no kicks. It had been enough to be restrained to keep me in line back then, because to struggle, or to wound the only way I could — with words — would only bring his own searing, white hot invectives, the ones that confirmed everything I already knew deep within me: You’re useless, you’re stupid, who said you could say that, who said you could think that? You call this a prison? You live in a paradise and you’re too fucking pathetic to realize how great you have it. I have given you everything and I can take it all away, too. What kind of a woman can’t have a baby? What ever happened to that great, big brain of yours? Stop moving. Stop it. Who owns this home? Who loves you most? Not him. Not him. It will always be me, Liss. Don’t fight it.

Alex and Charlie were sprinting by now, bobbing through wedding guests getting down to Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me.” “You fucking drop her hand, Cranford,” Al yelled as he skidded across the floorboards. Shirttails loose, tie looped loosely around his neck, he had the air of a drunken schoolboy spoiling for a fight. If anyone on the dancefloor noticed what was going on over in this corner of the barn, no one seemed to care as Minty and Tom Gregory were at that moment bumping and grinding while a chant of “Go Minty! Go Tom! Go Minty! Go Tom!” pulsed through the crowd.

Jules dropped my wrist like he’d realized belatedly he was holding a particularly noxious dog turd; he even wiped his hand on his shirt for good measure. “Well, well, right on time,” he sneered, not even bothering with the usual dissembling grin he favored when facing off with Alex. Julian tried to pull Amanda closer, but this time she ducked the arm he thrust out to reel her in. Instead she tucked herself into the crook of the arm Charlie extended for her and leaned into him, nuzzling some of her makeup on his pinstripe suit.

“Right on time for what? Do I get to see you fuck off and die at last, you scabby little shite?” Alex spat, drawing close, too close, to Julian. From where I stood, I could practically see the alcoholic vapors rising from his skin; I certainly could smell them.

“Alex,” Charlie warned. “Leave it.”

“Oh no, Charlie,” Jules drawled, running a hand through his hair. “Let him do it. Caveman has to prove to woman he is big strong man, ug ug!” He beat his chest rapidly with both fists, like an angry silverback. “Well, Carr, you should know your woman has been slandering me in front of mine, calling me a serial cheater. Projection is a terrible drug, nearly as bad as all that cocaine you probably still snort to get yourself through your miserable days.”

“I’m not your woman, Julian,” Amanda protested, peeling herself away from Charlie to stand her ground. “I said I wanted to see where this could go and I have to say, I’m not impressed with the way it’s gone at all. In fact, it may very well have went.”

This was bad, very bad, not good at all.

“You bitch,” Julian hissed, taking a step away from Alex in my direction. “This is all your fault — all of it! I never should have taken you back, not in Bristol, not the second engagement. I should have let you both live in your little hell together — God knows, you both still would have found a way to get my money, just less of it. Never begrudged your sister a penny of it, Al, but you’re a man. What kind of a man would be happy to live off another’s hard work? You’re still doing it with every bill you let her pay. That’s my money paying your rent, even now. Pathetic.” Julian shook his blond head in mock pity.

Alex’s silence troubled me more than Julian’s taunts. To me, he looked as menacing as a cobra, pulling back, bobbing slightly, and waiting, waiting for the moment to strike. He pushed his rolled-up sleeves higher and stretched his arms in front of him in dangerous show: I’m ready, are you?

“Alex,” I croaked, reaching out to tug at his arm, but he shook me off. “Please. Please. Let’s go.”

Julian’s whoop carried high above the shrieks of the dancers. “Chop chop, run along! Let your woman tell you what to do. No wonder you couldn’t be happy with me, Liss — you think you need to wear the trousers, all that useless feminist rubbish. You know you always needed a strong hand to guide you, and do you know?” Jules stepped closer to me, stroking his beard, and I hate, hate myself, but in that moment I could not help but to feel the static crackle of it once more arc from his body to mine, a reminder of how even now there was still some rebel part of me that responded to him.

“What?” The dancers on the floor spun faster and faster, their booze-tinged sweat mingling with the suffocating scent of cinnamon spice that floated down from garlands of pine cones and silk maple leaves above our heads.

“I bet you do know,” he continued, touching his tongue briefly to his upper lip. “You still love me, and you always, always will. As I told you before, my door is always open if you want to come home.”

I felt more exposed than if he’d torn the dress straight from my frame and ripped my bra and knickers off. Even then, I might have covered my body with my arms, hidden behind Alex, run into the ladies’ room. But there was no refuge from a truth that snaked its way through every day, its sibilant hiss reminding me: there is a part of you that will always be his, a part of him you will always be drawn to.

Without pausing to reflect, I lunged forward to slap Julian’s face but he stilled my arm in his strong grip, squeezing my forearm viciously in a pulsating beat. “Tsk,” he tutted. “Never once raised a hand to me in all our years and now you leap to violence. Wonder where you learned this little trick — did he try it first on you? How insensitive, given your… history, No wonder you’re looking for an affair, might get your mind off what life’s like at home.”

It didn’t sound like a human at first, more like the roar of the tide or an enormous beast let out of its shackles after years. “I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU!” Alex howled as he rushed past me, breaking Julian’s grip to slam him into the table behind us. Julian tumbled to the floor, along with the gilt-trimmed guestbook and gaudy maribou-ended pen for writing well wishes to the bride and groom on their happiest of days.

The squeak of the table juddering across the floor at last drew the attention of the other guests — to be fair, it was during a Celine Dion song that was nearly impossible to dance to anyway. A moment of hush, then a shout of “Fight! Fight!”, from Bex’s Bahamian Nana, no less.

Alex shook Charlie and me off him in quick succession. “Want some, Jules? Want some more? I got plenty of it, you soft, glaikit bastard!” I’d never seen Al look like this before — predatory, mean. A glassy, antic gleam lit his soft brown eyes; his chest heaved harder than when he’d occasionally join me for a jog in Berkeley.

Julian tossed aside the feathery pen that had pierced his beard like a comic arrow, and launched himself from from where he’d lain sprawled in the mess of seasonal gourds that had decorated the table only seconds before. “You thieving, cheating, Scottish shit! You stole my wife because you couldn’t keep your own!”

With the fluid ease of the athlete he’d crafted himself into over the years, Julian landed a punch worthy of Muhammed Ali directly in Alex’s right eye socket, surprising us all into silence. Even Jules stilled for a moment, looking down at his fist in wonder: Hey! I did that!

Alex was stunned by the force of the blow, stumbling momentarily back into Charlie’s shoulder before he rested one hand on mine to right himself. The other he raised to pat at his eye distractedly for a few beats. When I reached up to his face, to gather it in my hands as I stood on tiptoe to inspect the damage, Alex flicked me away with a featherlight touch, as if I were some vexing insect invading his space. Jules was right, I thought, this isn’t about me.

“Nice punch, you fuckin’ shitstain,” Alex hissed, yanking off his tie, sending the moonstone tiepin sailing into the air to land at my feet. “Got another one? I’ve got a few saved up for you. Been saving them up ever since you convinced me treating Charity like crap was the way to keep her begging for more. You always wanted me miserable as you are, you useless cunt!”

“You really want another?” Julian panted and swept the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand, a movement so utterly unlike the man who always had a pristine handkerchief in his pocket. There it was — oh! I’d seen it again, the masculine power that had caught me on its hook like a wriggling fish years before, when I’d let it reel me with promises of a life where I wouldn’t have to think so much, feel so much for anything but him, my husband. After years of living with too many thoughts and feelings, it was too seductive. I wanted the kind of freedom through service Josh had once provided. So I let him land me on the shore, where he held me high in victory, then gutted me with my permission after the wedding snaps were in the album. And still, even now with the mark of his cruelty beginning to blossom light cherry red on my true love’s face, it was Julian I wanted to calm, not Alex. Traitor, my heart jeered at me.

By now, the dancefloor crowd was drifting into a haphazard half-moon behind us, an occasional word of encouragement to keep the punches flying sailing over our shoulders to egg on the fighters. Squinting now from the impact of the punch, Alex spat a gob at Julian’s feet, landing on the polished toe of the beautiful John Lobbs I’d helped him select several years before, on that last trip together to the UK. “No, mate,” Al laughed, stepping towards Jules, cutting the distance between them by just over an arm’s length. “It’s my turn, don’t you think?”

Miranda had wormed her way through the crowd assembled to watch two well-heeled and totally shit-faced men have at it, like a particularly smart WrestleMania. “Stop it!” she commanded, her voice as firm and cowing as my mother’s when Rachel and I descended into pushing and shoving over some perceived girlhood slight. “Grow up, the both of you.”

“Fuck off, Ran,” Alex and Julian growled in unison.

To her credit, Miranda didn’t blink a single one of her fake eyelashes. “Alex, I never expect good behavior from you. But Jules, really? Aren’t you supposed to be in complete control of yourself?”

Amanda had slipped from Charlie’s side again, sidling next to Miranda where her chest heaved ominously from the neckline of her dress. For her sake, I prayed to the god of tit tape to keep her decent. “You’re a beast!” she roared, pointing one pink-lacquered finger nail at my ex-husband. “What did Alex ever do to you?”

“Well, there was Mel, of course,” Miranda said with a brief, Gallic shrug. “But that was really in nearly everyone’s best interest.”

“True,” Amanda conceded, tipping back the last of her flute of champagne, though not all of it made it in her mouth. One trickle coursed from her scarlet lips down her chin, down her long neck, and deep, deep into the chasm of her cleavage. It was all rather distractingly tantalizing, even for a straight woman like me. Who could blame Julian, whom I’d spotted only an hour before outside in the smoker’s den getting a rather enthusiastic motorboating from Amanda, from breaking the death glare he’d been training on Alex?

And then: THWAAAAAPPPPP

It was indeed Alex’s turn, though what might have been intended as a hard uppercut to the jaw had transformed itself mid-strike into a blistering slap; Al had literally pulled his punch.

“That’s for shtarters, Julesh, meant to shlap you, just g-getting warmed up,” Al stuttered and slurred and stumbled while Jules rubbed his jaw. That no one rushed forward to console Julian was not lost on me, nor was Al’s now patent ratarsedness, even in my own slosh of inebriation.

“You pathetic, drunken fuck,” Julian sneered, his cheekbone flushed with the red mark where Alex’s hand had struck moments before. “Can’t do anything right, can you? Poor, poor Alex with his poor, poor family, always with his hand out for someone to push another stack of cash in it. First me, then your wife, now my wife. Just to piss it all away, again and again.”

“I am NOT your wife!” I howled, and threw the macaron I was (somehow) still clutching in my left hand at Julian’s head, where it plicked off his brow quite audibly.

Alex took his chance, gaining his footing from where he’d been stumbling and rushed forward once more, this time head first like a battering ram, his target Julian’s gut. He never made it, meeting instead the obsidian wall of Will’s solid 240 lbs. of rugger beefcake gone to seed. None of us had noticed Will’s surreptitious emergence from the crowd behind us to block the impact and knock Alex to the floor. At Will’s feet, Alex gingerly patted the crown of his curly head. I kicked off my ridiculous heels to join him where he groaned on the parquet floor.

Will clapped an arm around Julian’s back and steered him towards the bar. “Go on, Jules,” he piped cheerily as the onlookers parted to let one of the gladiators through. “Let’s get a drink in you.”

“How’d I do, lovely?” Alex murmured sweetly from where he now lay prone near the remains of the guestbook table, his head of unruly black curls resting in my lap. Where Julian had struck him was quickly swelling; his eye now opened only halfway. I kicked a decorative gourd away so Miranda could join us on the floor. “Did I slay the monster?”

“Near enough,” I assured him.

It was as good a lie as any.

***

And that — at last — is the end of the wedding debacle which unfolded almost exactly one year ago. Pre-COVID, pre-apocalypse, pre-murder hornets and #coronabesties and Jen getting pregnant. Pre-moving to Santa Monica, for that matter — it hadn’t even been something in the air when Charlie, Sasha, Miranda and I had said our good-byes to the newlyweds, when Alex had offered his profuse apologies while he held a napkin full of ice to his swollen eye. Will stuck around a bit longer, but the rest of us had jammed into a Vauxhall Zafira Jamie summoned for us from Uber. For a group of loudmouths and brayers and gobshites, we were all uncharacteristically silent, from SUV to vicarage front door and through into the library.

Sasha and Charlie had both sobered up sufficiently to take charge of tea making in the kitchen, while Miranda and I subtly jockeyed for position as Alex’s personal Nightingale nurse. By then, Alex had curled his long body to fit on the beige and pink floral sofa and was holding to his face the packet of frozen peas we’d stopped to pick up at a Spar market on the way back. “Sweetest,” he bleated piteously. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Just sit up and have some tea.” I motioned to Miranda to pass me the delicate chinoiserie teacup, but instead she brought it to Al’s lips for him to take a slurp.

“There you are, Alexander,” she reassured. “Good boy. A nice cup of tea will sort you out.”

“He’s not a child,” I snapped. She’d already taken advantage of my brief trip upstairs to change into yoga pants and a sweater to muscle in as Charlie’s chief assistant while he examined my near-enough-to-fiance’s darkening eye socket. When I’d emerged from the bathroom fresh-faced and nearing half-sobriety, I’d found her taking off Alex’s shoes for him while Charlie checked his reflexes and shone a light in his eyes, looking for anything more than what was shaping up to be a spectacular black eye.

Alex didn’t seem to care who was doting on him, or even that he was being doted upon. “I want to die,” he moaned, squashing the icy peas on his face even flatter. “I did mean to punch Jules at first, you know, didn’t mean to slap him. Just thought: what’s the point? I’m sick of the twat. Punching him would have only made him feel better ’bout himself.”

His shirt was half-unbuttoned, exposing the dark hair there, and I watched Miranda raise her hand as if to touch it before she stuffed her hand in the pocket of the less-glamorous jogger bottoms she’d changed into. “Quite right,” she sniffed, feeding Al another sip of tea. “Jules simply adores being the martyr.”

I pulled the bag away from Alex’s eye to inspect the near-burgundy puff to his lid. “As they say, never wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.” Alex flinched where I prodded him lightly, then leaned his nose into my palm to nuzzle me.

Miranda draped one of the Welsh blankets over Alex’s torso and legs, pausing to muss his hair. Alex let out another pathetic bleat, this time of appreciation (I think). “American sayings are so droll sometimes,” she smirked. Alex pulled the blanket higher and snuggled beneath it.

“That’s Shaw,” I corrected. “As in George Bernard.”

“Good one, Mel.” Alex’s voice was muffled from where he’d burrowed himself completely beneath the wool. “Now will one of you please kill me.”

Nobody had the strength to, really, even if they wanted. Every one of us was exhausted from the booze and the burnout of watching our close-knit group completely and utterly implode at last. Miranda and Sasha eventually passed out in a pile of blankets they’d nabbed from a linen cupboard, occasionally letting free a snort or sleep-mumble about being cold. While Charlie commandeered the ancient TV set for what was left of the Namibia v. Canada rugby match, Alex had found room for me on the sofa beside him. Nobody stirred when Will’s arrival with a stack of Domino’s let a blast of chilly October air through the old house, though Alex’s stomach burbled in anticipation.

Heeding Will’s cry for “a bit of help in the kitchen, if you don’t mind, Mel,” I shuffled towards the back of the house in my shearling slippers. A whopper of a hangover was already marshalling itself for a full-bore assault on my body at barely 9pm, near-sobriety and oceans of tea be damned. I’d caught a glimpse of myself in the gilt-framed hallway mirror, and I had a distinctly pea soup cast to my complexion. When I pushed my way into the kitchen, Will was disgustingly red-cheeked and chipper, humming the Match of the Day theme tune to himself while he brought down a stack of stoneware plates from the cupboard and rinsing off a large chef’s knife in the sink. A blast of steam from the hot water fogged his glasses briefly; he wiped them on a dangling tail of the dress shirt he still wore.

My stomach sang as well, but the words were more like Alex’s gurgling gut than anything truly melodic. “Thanks, Will,” I said through the slice of pepperoni I snaffled for myself, not waiting for permission. “How’d you end up so sober?”

“Not hard, just stopped drinking, unlike the rest of you.” Will shrugged and reached into the box for a slice of his own. “Someone needed to be responsible. Even Chaz was busy throwing them back, too much thinking about Terry.”

“Even now?” I dotted at the corners of my mouth with one of the napkins I’d gathered.

Will nodded gravely. “Even now. Not that he talks to me much about it. Clams up, you know, with me when it comes to sticky stuff like emotions. Amanda handles that stuff for him.”

“I hadn’t realized they’d grown so close.”

“Man and Chaz? Mmm, I know you have your own opinion of her, but I don’t share it. You’re really quite like each other in some ways, sure that’s not the first time you’ve heard that.” With one arm he grabbed the pizzas and pushed open the swing door to the hall.

With a grudging grunt, I gathered the plates and tossed the napkins on top to make my way back to the study. In a moment of “why the fuck not,” I swiped the last, half-empty bottle of brandy from the counter.

“Not a half-bad idea,” Will chirped, as we walked through the hush of the hallway to the study. “Ran is going to go spare when she hears about the pics on Poship, might need another nip.”

“‘Poship’?” I asked, fumbling with the porcelain doorknob.

The door flung open so rapidly I had to keep myself from tumbling to floor, napkins, brandy and all at Miranda’s bare feet. “Please tell me we’re not in Poship,” Miranda croaked, relieving me of the bottle. She viciously drew the cork and sank a mouthful.

“Oh, fuck that,” Sasha groaned from beneath a pile of quilts.

Alex dropped the bag of peas and stalked across the room to relieve me of the plates. “What’s Poship?” he quizzed, popping a kiss on the crown of my head.

Will’s low whistle grated on my burgeoning headache. “Jesus, Carr, your eye. Who knew Jules had it in him?”

Alex’s eye had yet to turn the deep purple of a shiner, but was instead alarmingly magenta. “He’s lucky you were there. Woulda knocked him for six if you’d let me. Got any ham and mushroom there?”

“What’s Poship?” I echoed Alex and passed him three slices, surely an appetizer given his near-legendary ability to inhale entire Asian buffets-worth of food.

Miranda nearly did a spit take, but kept it in at the last moment, sucking what was left of her second glug back in her mouth. (Given how little brandy was left in the bottle, it was probably a good idea.) “How do you not know about Poship? Alex, you get a pass, you’re a male. Why won’t my bloody phone unlock?”

“It’s a gossip website about posh people.” Will’s voice was garbled as he munched another slice of pepperoni. “Posh gossip. Posh. Ip. Poship.”

“This IS my fingerprint, idiot phone!” Miranda ranted at her screen. “They show up outside Annabel’s and Soho House and wait for nobs like us to fall out of our tops or flash our knickers or just generally be awful in public.”

“And sometimes they get a mole in an event, like a wedding or some ghastly house party in Shropshire,” Sasha added from beneath her quilt-fort. “I’ve had to confiscate phones at events I’ve planned. I’ve got it open, Ran.” She flung back the covers with a resounding “HA!”

“Can’t this wait until halftime?” Charlie sighed, muting the match in defeat.

I’d googled the site on my own phone and there we all were, all utterly bolloxed in a slideshow of embarrassment titled quite simply and accurately, “FAIRLEIGH BAD BEHAVIOUR.”

Recipe for a wedding day shitshow: take two former best friends, add the American they both fell in love with, and top with lashings and lashings of top shelf booze. Serve with a black eye and a total loss of dignity. We’re here for it!

“Oh god,” Miranda wailed as she peered over my shoulder. “Poship is the worst!”

Forty or so pictures in total, the first fifteen or so rather anodyne snaps of Jamie’s Bristol and London sets, redfaced and slightly sweaty, clinking glasses and grooving with the unabashed cluelessness of the rich and white who don’t really have to care if they can actually dance with any talent. Then Bex’s far more racially diverse family — half Chinese, half West Indian — and friends showing them how it’s really done, with less racist commentary than I’ve come to expect from a trash mag in a country that happily slurs Meghan Markle everywhere. Then, there we all were, in quick succession:

Minty Fresh! Araminta Bosworth-Carr and Tom Gregory can’t get enough of each other on the dancefloor. Remember her name — her ex-husband is about to play a starring role.

Big 70s mood from the always haute glam Sasha Yavorska, in a surprisingly affordable dress from Reformation (get her look for only £265.00 at Selfridges!)

“They got that affiliate link in there fast,” Sasha quipped.

Don’t they make a lovely pair? Amanda Harrington shows us good things come in twos.

Alex burped over my other shoulder while we all ogled the sight of Amanda and her cleavage bending over a selection of mini-eclairs at the dessert table. “They are rather stupendous. Ow!” He rubbed his arm where I’d leaned back to slap it. “Not nice to wound the wounded.”

Will Prater and Charlie Fawcett — best friends of the groom. One’s straight, one’s gay, both are BACHELORS, so we’ve got one for whatever tickles your fancy.

And then:

Meet Alexander St. Clair Carr, ladies. Mrrrrrowr! Don’t get too attached, this posh bit of Scottish totty (Scot-ty?) is off the market again and living in sunny California now, so we’re told. More’s the pity. If you find yourself single again, Mr. Carr, CALL US.

“You do look quite nice there, Al,” Miranda assured him. And he did — he’d been caught in profile, mid-laugh, during the cocktail hour. Though I’d been mostly cropped out of the frame, I knew here he’d been stroking my back lightly while he joked with Charlie about Will’s mysterious Miss K. The light dusting of freckles from earlier in the summer remained on his high cheekbones. The handsomest man in the room, pipping Julian to that honor by more than a few measures, at least by my estimation.

“Rubbish,” he scoffed. “I’m still that tosser who had to be whipped into shape by an army of women. And Jules, of course.” Despite that dismissal, I was pretty sure he was delighted to be considered a bit of totty, even in a rag like Poship.

“Speaking of.” Miranda paused on a snap of Julian, arm slung around Tom Gregory, as the pair grinned for a camera that wasn’t the one taking this particular shot. Though Julian had been an attractive young man when I’d met him, there was something waiting to be formed about his features, like a master sculptor was working on him and stepped away for lunch. Over the years though, that sculptor returned to his masterwork, to strip away the boy-plumpness in his body, to brighten his hair (okay, that may have been at a stylist’s hands), to fashion him into a man. I could not deny his beauty, as much as I wished.

Mmmmmmm! Julian Cranford hasn’t been on this side of the pond either in years, but we’re glad to have him back. He’s rich, hot AND the ink’s barely dry on his divorce papers. Seen canoodling with Amanda Harrington, word is they are NOT officially a couple… yet.

And then, there I was, glass of champagne in my hand, fiddling with the pumpkin spice macaron I’d later bounce off Julian’s bonce. I was more than a bit pleased they’d caught me looking dreamy (read: attractively drunk) and post-lipstick touch-up, rather than scowling at Miranda pinching Alex’s derriere. The waves I’d forced into my hair earlier were holding up (thank you, Lord Elnett), and Rachel was right about that Valentino dress: scarlet really is my color.

Lady in Red! Meet Melissa Cranford, soon to be Melissa Carr if rumors are true. What?? This pretty Yank acquired a taste for Brits and is tearing through them at a ferocious clip. Poship has heard that she did very nicely in her divorce from Julian Cranford earlier this year, enough to keep herself and the gorgeous Alex Carr in caviar and bottles of Château Lafite for quite some time after their rumoured California wedding next year.

“What rubbish,” Sasha groused, kicking off the last of the quilts to join Charlie on the floor; he’d given up completely on even watching the end of the match in all this commotion and was now scrolling through his own phone, transfixed. “Are you loaded now though?”

“Rude,” Will groused.

I swiped left on my phone for the next picture, one where Julian was barring the slap I’d longed to lay on his cheek. Now here’s the goss, Poshippers — seems the Cranford marriage fell apart when Mr. Carr fell in love with Mrs. Cranford. What’s an affair anyway amongst the well-heeled? Well, it’s more than an affair when one best friend steals another’s wife after years of constant companionship. It gets… personal.

Then fast, fast, fast, a series of photos that memorialized the ignominy of the show we’d put on: the shove into the decorative gourds, the feather pen in Julian’s beard. The sting of the punch to Alex’s eye, followed by a 1-2-3-4 photo burst of Alex in motion as he lurched towards Jules and bungled his own jab.

In the last photo in the slideshow, I sat cross-legged and barefoot on the floor, cradling Alex’s head with one hand while he arched his back in pain. With the other arm I reached for a napkinful of ice proffered by Charlie, who crouched on his haunches beside me. In the background, Sasha offered a sobbing Minty a sip from her topped-up flask, while Miranda helped Amanda push a breast back into her dress.

Nothing like toffs behaving badly, eh? Many thanks and best wishes to the Fairleigh-Smiths for letting us get an exclusive on their nuptials. They promised Poship a show and they delivered!

With a short bark of a laugh that tore into my throbbing head, Charlie slapped Sasha on the back. “Those cheeky buggers! I suppose that’s one way to do it, get out in front of the coverage for less embarrassing snaps.”

“Less embarrassing? We look appalling! My mother is going to kill me!” Miranda wailed, wringing the front of my sweater. “And they didn’t even mention my name!”

***

As I write, I am twenty days from my own wedding to that bit of posh totty, Mr. Carr. No barn with pumpkins or delicate rabbit and apple compote hors d’oeuvres, no grand entrance in a Norman church or getting down to Tom Jones singing “It’s Not Unusual” with someone’s Great-Uncle Randolph. I won’t be in organza and tulle or chiffon or silk; Alex has wisely eschewed a morning suit, for himself or anyone else. No chicken dijon or chocolate bon-bons or signature cocktails.

These very odd times create odder circumstances — our guest list has been pruned to my parents, Rachel and Matt and Fenn. Yes, Fenn! She is currently quarantining in Cabo San Lucas, con Julian, desde luego. Seizing the opportunity to see both her brother and my toad of an ex, she packed a bagful of kaftans and bikinis and hopped on a plane to Mexico City (first class, courtesy of Jules). In a moment of clarity quite unlike herself, she understood there would be no plus one on her invitation. Not that we’d invited her — she announced she’d be coming on a Family Zoom, and Alex’s enthusiastic “YES!” made it impossible to bar her appearance. At the very least, I do not fear that Julian will sweep in like the Wicked Fairy to curse our marriage; Fenn didn’t need to be told that was the price of admission.

We will instead wed in my parents’ backyard, beneath the treehouse of my childhood, a space in which I’d dreamed of my handsome English prince who’d ride up on his steed and carry me away to the castle. Well, that dream had come true, but it was a bit of a nightmare. But like all good stories, or at least the ones I like, the heroine gets another shot after she’s clawed her way out of her misery-hole. This time my prince is a duke, and he’s Scottish, not English. We’ll arrive together in a 1985 Mercedes biodiesel which sometimes stinks of chip fat, and we’ll spirit ourselves away to our new life in the sunny kingdom by the sea. No castle, just a two-bed apartment above a nail salon and an Italian restaurant.

This time, though, no trusty steed. The duke will let me drive.