PART 2 — SATURDAY
I am going to do the Saturday quickly, because everybody wants it and it is not the part that matters.
The dress went at ten past three in the morning. Paddy and Nuala walked it down the fire stairs to the new suite and I did my hair in a different room from the one on the schedule.
The rings were not in Nadia’s bag. They had not been in Nadia’s bag since about half two; my brother knocked on her door at twenty to three and said the planner needed them for the registrar and she handed them over in a dressing gown without blinking.
Dilly got a message at eight saying the bridal suite had moved. The other three did not.
Nadia spent about ninety minutes that morning in an empty room with a steamer and no dress in it.
And at eleven o’clock she came down the main stairs into the lobby in her bridesmaid’s dress to find that there was no job for her to do.
She asked three different people where I was. All three of them said the same four words, which Nuala had given them at about six that morning: she’s with the photographer.
And Nadia Prew stood in that lobby for about twenty minutes in a dress she had chosen herself, with nothing to carry and nowhere to be.
That is the only part of the day I did design, and I want to be honest about it: I did not do it to protect anything.
The dress was already moved. The rings were already gone. By six in the morning there was nothing left for her to ruin.
I made her stand in a lobby because I wanted her to stand in a lobby.
There were also four people at the top table who had been given a quiet instruction about where she was sitting.
I got married at twelve. It was lovely. I have about two hundred photographs and I am in all of them and I look like somebody who had slept, which I had not.
Nadia Prew was at my wedding from start to finish.
That is the thing people cannot get over. I did not have her removed. She sat at table nine with my aunt’s friends and she had the beef and she clapped at the speeches.
Because what I had decided at about three in the morning is that I was not going to spend my own wedding day on her.
The recording went to nobody that day. Not one person heard it before the Monday except Paddy, who I played it to in a stairwell at four in the morning and who I had to physically stop from going up there.
I will say one thing about the Saturday that is mine.
At about half nine that night, at the end of it, Nadia came over and hugged me and said it had been a beautiful day.
And I hugged her back and said thank you.
I have thought about that for a long time and I am not proud of it and I would do it again.
One other thing about the Saturday.
The duty manager at the Sandgrove is a woman of about fifty called Ivy Prosser and she got my message at twenty past two in the morning on a Friday night.
PART 3 — THE FOURTEENTH OF NOVEMBER
We went away on the Sunday and I did not say anything to Jory until the Tuesday night, in a rented place at Ardmere with the sea about four hundred yards away.
I played him four minutes and eleven seconds on a kitchen table.
And my husband of three days listened to all of it, and when it stopped he did not say oh my God and he did not say I’ll kill her.
He put his hands flat on that table and he said: “Right.”
And I said: “Right?”
And Jory Hale said: “Freya. I need to tell you about November.”
The fourteenth of November last year. Four months before.
There was a thing for his work at the Lyle and I did not go because I had a cold, and Nadia was there because she works for the same group two floors down and always has, which is how I met her in 2019.
She asked him to share a taxi. He said yes, because why would you not.
And in that taxi she put it to him. Not subtly and not drunkenly enough to be deniable. He has given me the words and I am not putting them down.
PART 4 — DILLY
I did not go off at him. I want that on the page because about four people have asked me whether I did.
I sat in that kitchen and I was very quiet for a long time, and what I was actually doing is the thing that comes next.
Because he was the second one.
Dilly Mowat tried to tell me in the December.
Dilly is the one on that recording who says you’re awful and who asks whether Jory would actually pick her. She is also the one who did not stop it and who laughed twice, and she knows that and she has not asked me to think otherwise.
But in the December she came over to me at my own engagement party with her phone in her hand.
And I took it off her.
That is Part Five and I am going to do it properly.
What I will do here is the arithmetic, because it is the only way I have been able to look at any of this.
Jory knew in November and said nothing for four months.
Dilly tried in December and I stopped her in about nine seconds.
Nadia had from the February until the night before, and used all of it.
And I noticed something myself in the April, wrote it down in my own phone, and deleted it.
That note said: N weird about J again? Or am I being mad.
Nine words and a date. I deleted it the same evening, and I remember deciding that keeping it would make me the sort of woman who keeps notes about her friends.
I have got it back, incidentally. There is a deleted folder and it holds them for thirty days, and I did not know that in the April and I did know it in the March.
PART 5 — THE ENGAGEMENT PARTY
The ninth of December, at my parents’. About twenty-five of us.
Dilly came and found me in the kitchen doorway with a drink in one hand and her phone in the other, and she was not relaxed.
She said: “Frey. Can I show you something.”
And I said what is it.
And she said: “It’s — can we go out the back a sec.”
And I took the phone out of her hand.
I did not look at it. I took it, face down, and I held it, and I said:
“Give me that — not tonight, Dill.”
And then, because my mother was about four feet away with a tray and because Jory’s parents had just arrived:
“Whatever it is, it’ll keep. Go and find Nadia, she’s doing the toast in a minute.”
Go and find Nadia.
I said that. I put a phone back into a woman’s hand and sent her to go and find the person she had come to warn me about.
And Dilly Mowat said: “Yeah. Fair enough.”
She says my face was perfectly friendly when I said it. That is the detail she has gone back to, and the one I cannot argue with.
I was not sharp with her. I did not sound annoyed. I handed her phone back and patted her arm and sent her off across a kitchen, warmly, in about nine seconds, in front of four people.
She has told me that she decided in that nine seconds that I already knew and had made my peace with it — because why else would a woman wave that off so easily.
That is what she took away from it, and she then spent three months believing I had looked at something like that and chosen to keep Nadia anyway.
Which is why, on the night before my wedding, Dilly Mowat was in that room and did not stop it.
She laughed twice. She has never once asked me to put that down to anything.
And she went and found Nadia.
I did not think about that exchange once until the fifteenth of March, in a rented kitchen at Ardmere, when my husband told me about a taxi.
And then it arrived whole, the way those do.
I have asked her since what was on that phone.
It was a message. Nadia to Dilly, from the November, four days after that taxi, which says something about Jory that I am not going to reproduce and which Dilly had been sitting on for a month and had finally worked herself up to.
She had come to my engagement party with it ready.
She had written out what she was going to say. On the notes app, in the car, in my parents’ road, before she came in.
She showed me that in the September. It is six lines and it is extremely careful and it has been rewritten — you can see where, because the first version is still underneath in a sort of draft she never cleared.
Six lines, rehearsed in a car, by a twenty-nine-year-old who had been sitting on a message for a month.
What did it was not an apology. He has done those.
It was something he said in the June, in the car, which is the only thing anybody has said about this that I cannot get round.
He said: “I made the same call you made, Frey. I just made mine first.”
I did not answer him in that car and he did not expect me to.
Where I have got to, eleven months on, is this.
What Nadia Prew did is hers and I have not spent one hour trying to understand it and I am not going to.
What the other three did — laughing instead of stopping her — is theirs, and two of them know it.
And the thing in the middle, which is mine and Jory’s and Dilly’s, is all the same thing wearing three coats.
Three people had a piece of it. All three of us decided that the person in front of us was better off not having to deal with it tonight.
He decided it in a taxi. She decided it in a car. I decided it twice — once with a phone in a kitchen doorway and once with a note in my own hand in April.
Not one of us was being cruel. Every single one of us thought we were being kind.
May you like
And the only reason any of it came out is that four women got drunk in a hotel room and forgot about a connecting door.
THE END
