Pictures of You

Prologue

My hand fishes surreptitiously through my bag for my phone while a string quartet plays Albinoni’s “Adagio” and reduces everyone around me to tears. My throat is aching from the stress. I try to wring moisture out of dry eyes, judgment burning from all corners of the Mary Immaculate Catholic Church in Waverley, and I fight the urge to escape.

I simply cannot be here.

Shouldn’t be here.

I don’t know these people. Not my mother-in-law, Gwendolyn, dabbing her eyes beside me in that careful way that prioritizes the integrity of your mascara over letting go of any real emotion. Not her husband, who hasn’t said a kind word to me since I woke up in the hospital a week ago. Not the Gucci suits fidgeting in the pews behind us, glancing at watches and mourning the passing of billable six-minute increments.

And not Oliver Roche. Gloriously good-looking, wildly successful commercial lawyer. Property investor. Philanthropist and taker of extravagant skiing holidays and European shopping trips, according to the “celebration of life” slideshow in which I am currently costarring on the big screen.

Love of my life, apparently.

Romantic evidence is blaring in polished, cinematic glory. There I am, growing up at warp speed beside him in the PowerPoint. He’s at his shiny best, all through school and university, on sports fields, at work, socially. I can’t help wondering what it would be like if the accident had claimed my life too, and these same people had to scramble together some sort of highlight reel about me .

A large teardrop diamond flashes on my left ring finger. Gwendolyn, urging me to wear it, frowning as though she couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t want to, said it wasn’t safe to leave the rings lying around at home. I try to feel grateful for it. For all of this. This luxurious life that Oliver and his family brought me into, even though I can’t imagine the steps I must have taken to get tangled up in it.

She looks my way for a second and I strive to squeeze out some sadness. If I concentrate really, really hard and bore the images into my brain of Oliver and me tapping champagne glasses at our engagement party, and the way he looks at me in that wedding photo—like I am the world to him—perhaps I’ll remember?

But as sunlight streams through stained-glass windows and bounces off the handles of the elaborate mahogany-and-brass coffin, roses trailing up the aisle Royal Wedding–style—every aspect of this showy farewell is another beacon of the kind of excess I loathe—I don’t feel anything. Except guilt that I am not the perfect widow.

My heart quickens as I imagine the lavish reception the Roches planned for afterward. It sounds like a Who’s Who of Sydney’s high society. I’ll be expected to make small talk with the kind of people I’ve only ever known from magazine covers and social pages while I continue, in vain, to search the room for Mum, Dad, and my best friend, Bree, who I desperately wish were here and who I’ve completely failed to reach. It’s as if I am dead too. Or trapped in some fever-induced nightmare from which I’m longing to wake up and can’t.

But there’s no fever. I’m not sick. And their inexplicable absence is snowballing even more panic—adrenaline coursing, nausea brewing, until I can’t take another second of this whole performance. Which brings me to my phone, the Uber I ordered during the Lord’s Prayer, and the fact that I am about to cause a major scene as I bolt out of here like some rebellious millennial runaway widow, straight through a throng of paparazzi outside the church. I’m about to hand them the scandal they all seem so breathless for …