Ali grabs hold of his hand and looks up at him, her face full of devotion. Rachel empties her glass of red wine, not knowing who she feels sorrier for. Herself or Will.
“Thank you for the loyalty you’ve shown and the trust you’ve put in me,” he says to her, amidst much ah-ing and aw-ing. “I will never let you down.”
He leans down for a kiss and the guests applaud and raise their glasses.
“To the happy couple,” says Jack, taking it as his cue to stand up. He clears his throat, and Rachel almost delights in how difficult this is going to be for him. Though not nearly as difficult as it’s going to be for her.
“I’ll keep it short,” he says. “As I know you’ll all be keen to get your dancing shoes on, but I just want to say a few words about having Will as a brother.”
Will groans and puts his head in his hands.
“Well, not so much a brother, as an acquaintance, who on the odd occasion he’s bothered to call me in the last ten years, shows up on my phone as ‘Will … you lend me a hundred pounds?’” The line gives him the laugh he’d hoped for when he’d practiced on Rachel the night before they left, when her world was a thousand light years away from the one she finds herself in now. When she’d lain there in bed, watching Jack as he strode up and down at the foot of it, pointing to her whenever he delivered what was supposed to be a humorous line.
She’d kept her face deadpan for all four of the puns, until, exasperated, he’d thrown his piece of paper in the air.
“You’re supposed to laugh,” he’d sighed.
“Well, maybe I just don’t find you funny,” she’d jested.
“No?” he challenged. “So, you don’t think I can make you smile?”
“Nope,” she’d said, as his head disappeared under the end of the duvet. She’d spread her legs as her book that had been lying dormant on her chest dropped to the floor.
“Still not smiling?” he’d mumbled through the quilt.
“Uh-uh,” Rachel had managed as she arched her back.
She looks at him standing beside her now and can’t help but wonder how many times he’s made Ali smile like that.
Bile rises, burning the lining of her throat with a poker-hot ferocity. If she stays here, she’s going to purge the remnants of her lobster casserole all over the table. With her face burning, more from embarrassment than the pressure of holding it in, she pushes her chair back and scoots behind a bewildered Jack toward where she hopes the toilets are. There are two doors; one’s clearly the kitchen, so she opts for the other, without looking back to see the trail of onlookers she might have left in her wake. Shutting herself into a cubicle, she pours cold water on the insides of her wrists and wills herself to calm down. But she can’t shake the image of Jack’s head buried between Ali’s legs from her mind.
“Rach!” comes Paige’s voice through the door. “You okay?”
Rachel lets her in and falls into her arms. “I can’t do this,” she says.
Paige stiffens. “Do you want me to take you back to the villa?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t know how I’m supposed to carry on and pretend that everything’s normal, when the best man, my husband, is fucking the bride.” She knows she’s had too much to drink as she’s lost all volume control as well as the propensity to care who might hear.
“Okay,” says Paige, backing Rachel onto the closed toilet seat. “You’ve got two choices here; you either find a way of getting through the next few hours without driving yourself insane, or we’ll say that you’re sick and I’ll take you back.”
“I should have stopped it,” cries Rachel, ashamed to acknowledge that if Ali didn’t have what she has over her, she would have. But instead of giving Will the chance to get out of a marriage that is destined to fail before it has even begun, she’d taken the coward’s way out, too scared of Ali’s recrimination; selfishly saving her own skin at the expense of Will’s. “He’s not done anything to deserve this and he’s going to be so devastated when he finds out he’s been betrayed by his brother and his wife. It’s him I’m most worried about in all of this. I couldn’t give a shit about Jack or Ali, or even me, but he’s done nothing wrong.”
Paige looks taken aback. “Er, neither have you.”
Rachel has never felt more compelled to tell Paige about Noah than now. She has done something wrong. So very wrong, and now, quite rightly, she has to suffer the consequences. She’s under no illusions about the double standards she’s currently living by.