There was a long silence. I could practically hear Oliver’s brain clicking at the other end of the line. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I’m being selfish. I’ve just… You’ve been very distracted recently and I’ve been very busy, and this has all come out of… Go and look after Bridget.
I’ll be fine.”
“Okay,” I said.
Because there was kind of nothing else I could say. And because I needed to get back to Bridge. And most of all because I wanted to believe him.
THERE’D BEEN NO WORD FROM Tom by the following morning.
Or, indeed, from Oliver. But then, I hadn’t texted him either. And it wasn’t because I didn’t want to. It was more that I couldn’t tell if we’d had a fight or not, and if we had, whose fault it had been. I mean, I had kind of dropped him on extra-special date night. Like a dick.
Except I’d only done that because I needed to take care of my friend.
Like definitely not a dick. Fuck. I was in a grey dick area.
Still, that was way better than wherever Bridge was. Which was a barely slept, woke up crying, increasingly convinced her fiancé was cheating on her area. We both called in sick because she was in no state to work and I wasn’t going to leave her in no state to work. And then we took a box of Frosties with us to the sitting room and huddled on the sofa together.
“I just don’t understand,” Bridge said through a mouthful of oversweetened breakfast cereal. “The wedding is next week. He can’t have just vanished. Vanished with a strange woman. Vanished with a strange woman and thrown his phone away.”
“And I’m sure he hasn’t,” I told her, although I wasn’t and hadn’t ever been and was getting less sure by the minute. “Something has probably come up at work.”
“Something that just happens to involve him putting his arms around women who aren’t me?”
I’d hoped sleeping on it would make things seem better, but it hadn’t. It had made them seem a whole lot worse. “How…how do you want to play this?” I asked. Because Bridge had made me her maid of honour, which meant it was my job help her plan her wedding or to help her burn it down if that was what she needed.
Bridge put down the Frosties and re-huddled into her blanket. “I don’t know. I just want to talk to him.”
At this point, I couldn’t tell if I was being supportive or useless.
Honestly, it was a bit of both. “We could… Do you want to… Should we tell…people? I mean, our friends people. Not, like, strangers in the street.”
For a long while, Bridge stared at her phone. “Do you think they could help find him?”
I gave a deeply uncertain shrug. The thing about our friendship group—and I very much included myself in this—was that we were always helpful but rarely useful. “It can’t hurt.”
“I suppose…I suppose it’s worth a try.”
I didn’t send the call out on our usual WhatsApp group— currently going under the situationally unfortunate name of Bi-bi Baby, Baby Bi-bi—because Tom was in it and, however this played out, it was unfair to be having the Tom-might-be-cheating-on-Bridge conversation in a group chat he was technically part of. It had all the worst elements of talking behind his back and to his face.
Instead, I pinged a message around the Bridge’s Bitches （In the Reclaimed Sense） list.
Minor wedding emergency, I texted, Tom seems to have vanished, help pls.
A few moments later, Bridge followed up with AND HE IS
SEEING ANOTHER WOMAN AND I AM SAD
From there, the conversation got quite complex in the way that multiperson text chains always did. Priya got in first with a Luc, is this legit and James Royce-Royce crossed that with an Oh what a prize bastard, assuming this isn’t all a tremendous misunderstanding.
Then Liz came back, probably replying to Priya with It might be legit, I saw him with somebody and it looked suspicious, which she followed up with But I don’t know anything for sure but not before Bernadette had stepped in with Whatever you need darling, we’re here for you and Priya had shot a Not sure that’s helpful probably replying to James Royce-Royce, to which he had replied with Well, excuse me for caring, I’m sure while the other James Royce-Royce had followed up with I think we can locate him if we work systematically from his last known location. All of which Bridget capped off with a YOUR SO LOVELY BUT I DON’T KNOW WHAT
TO DO??
Neither did anyone else, so we called an emergency in-person meeting for those who could make it, with those who couldn’t keeping up as best they could via text. By noon, Bridge’s tiny flat was packed out with me, Liz, Priya, and James Royce-Royce, who’d spent ten minutes manoeuvring an incredibly complicated stroller up a flight of stairs and then another ten minutes painstakingly de-strollering Baby J and strapping him to his chest.