Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Beck
I was prepared. I’d tweaked my strategy of how to approach Henry about the Mayfair property. I’d just tell him how I hadn’t made the connection earlier, but that he must be the Henry Dawnay who owned the Dawnay building and go from there.
I was ready to see him again.
Primed to make my move.
But he wasn’t bloody here.
I checked my watch for the seventieth time that evening.
It was almost ten and this thing was supposed to be over by ten-thirty.
He was a no show. I’d kept my ears open all night, but I’d not heard anyone mention him.
I swirled the tonic water in my glass, keeping the door to the reception room in my eyeline as it had been all evening, hoping he would make a last-minute appearance.
It was useless. I might as well go back to the room.
I drained my glass and headed out. Maybe I’d check the car park to see if Henry’s car was still there.
Although, that wouldn’t tell me much—he might have simply done something else for the evening.
I kept telling myself to be patient, but I didn’t have an infinite amount of time. There was just over a week left.
As I turned the corner, laughter from the conservatory caught my attention. Through the small-paned glass, I saw Stella chatting to Florence amongst the other women of the wedding party.
I paused and just as I did, she turned and saw me watching her almost as if she knew I was there.
She looked stunning, her hair scraped up into a ponytail, her face slightly flushed.
Without thinking, I grinned at her, and she smiled back before dipping to say something to Florence and then heading in my direction.
“Hey,” she said as she got closer. “You okay?”
I shrugged. “I thought I’d head back to the room and catch up on emails.”
She blinked a couple of times as if she were waiting for me to say something else, to tell the truth.
“I’ll come too,” she said after a couple of seconds.
“You don’t need to.” I needed to catch up with work but at the same time it would be good to have some company. Someone to ruminate with on where Henry was. Someone I could run my newly tweaked strategy by.
She looked up at me as if she were peering into my brain, wanting to know if what I said and what I meant were matching. “I know. But I want to. Let me just get my bag.”
As Stella went to leave, the bride caught up with her and Stella visibly stiffened when she pressed her hand on her arm. “You’re leaving?” Karen asked, all smiles.
Stella smiled back, but I knew her well enough now to distinguish a real smile from a fake one, and there was nothing genuine about the smile Stella wore. “We want to save some energy for all these different events,” Stella replied.
“Yes, it’s spectacular, isn’t it? It was Matt’s idea to make a week of it—a real celebration. And I love Scotland, as you know, although I’d not been to the castle until Matt brought me up here to convince me that this was where we needed to get married.”
Karen continued to chatter on, but Stella didn’t say a word—she just nodded and gave intermittent tight smiles. It was a side of Stella I hadn’t seen much of, like a deer caught in the headlights. She seemed vulnerable and . . . stuck.
I stepped forward, taking Stella’s rigid hand. “I’m dragging her away. I hope you don’t mind,” I said as Stella’s palm melded against mine.
“Of course not,” Karen said. “I’m so delighted you’re here to celebrate with us. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Stella’s fake smile faded, and she turned to me. “Thank you. I always get tongue-tied around . . . her.”
I’d seen a very different Stella to the one holding my hand. One who was determined and unafraid to ask for what she wanted. Someone confident. Sure of herself. What was it about Karen that made Stella lose her ability to speak?
We made our way toward the stairs, still hand in hand. “You went out with Matt for ages, right?” I asked.
“Since university.”
“But you know Henry, who is Karen’s godfather—you said you went to stay with him. So you knew her before she was going out with Matt?”
“We’ve been best friends since the age of five,” she said as she tried to pull her hand from mine, but I tightened my grip.
“And now she’s marrying your ex-boyfriend. Is that weird?” It seemed weird to me but horses for courses.
We reached the top of the staircase and turned down the corridor toward our room in silence.
Eventually, Stella said, “It’s a little weird.”
I didn’t spend enough time talking to women about personal stuff to know much, but I knew from the silence, the way she’d gone stiff and looked at the ground when Karen came along, that a little weird was an understatement.
“How long after you and Matt splitting did he and Karen get together?”
She gave a half laugh, half sigh and then shook her head. “I have no idea. Matt and I broke up about three months ago. I didn’t know there was anything between him and Karen until I got the wedding invitation.”
“Jesus, Stella. I had no idea.” It made sense why it had taken so much to get her to come to this wedding. “Why the hell were you invited?”
She twisted her hand out of mine then dug about in her evening bag.
“Oh, you know, I think they wanted to pretend it was all fine or something. Act as if it shouldn’t be a big deal because Matt and I had split.
And they wouldn’t have expected me to come.
” She held up the key card and I took it from her, unlocking the door and holding it open before she stepped inside.
“You must want to design the Mayfair building pretty badly.”
“More now than when you first asked me. It’s like I didn’t realize that’s what I needed—as if it’s given me a future, something to aim for,” she replied.
I stayed silent as the words stuck in my throat, weighed down by sorrow for her. If she hadn’t been able to see a future for herself, she’d clearly been devastated.
“I’m just going to go and get changed,” she said, scooping her nightclothes from the bed and heading for the bathroom before I thought of something to say.
I stripped down to my boxers, turned on the TV, and lay against the headboard as I scrolled through my phone as if that had the answers.
“Hey, where’s our pillow wall?” she asked as she emerged from the bathroom, her hair piled on top of her head and her pajamas on. She looked fantastic when she was dressed up, all magazine-glossy, but Stella was one of those women who looked even better without all that stuff.
“Housekeeping must have demolished it.”
“Well, I guess you’re safe tonight. I’m sober,” she said as she peeled back the covers on her side of the bed.
“I sort of like drunk you,” I replied, putting down my phone and sliding under the covers.
She laughed as she lay down on her side facing me. “It’s not a look I wear well.”
“From what I’ve seen, you wear most things well,” I replied. “Want to talk about Matt? Or Karen?”
She shook her head and placed her hands under her cheek.
“There’s nothing to say. I thought he would be the man I’d spend the rest of my life with and later this week he’s going to marry the person I thought was my best friend.
Safe to say my judgement’s a bit wonky. I’ve just got to get through this week, focus on my future and not my past.”
Silence stretched between us.
“That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway,” she added.
I curled her hair around her ear, not knowing how to make it better for her.
I’d done nothing but make it worse. “I’m sorry I brought you here.
” I’d made her come face-to-face with these people who’d hurt her.
She’d said she didn’t know when Karen and Matt started seeing each other, but to be getting married only a few months after Matt and Stella split, there must have been something going on while they were still together.
I hated cheaters.
“Don’t be. You’re helping me with my future, remember?”
It didn’t seem enough. “Did you not want to marry him? Is that why you split up?”
She stared across me at the dresser under the window. “I’d have married him years ago and he knew that. I thought we were just waiting for the right time. Apparently, it wasn’t the time that was wrong, but the girlfriend.”
Listening to her, it was like my stomach was filling with curdled milk. “You expected him to marry you, and he led you on and then found a better option?” It sounded familiar. At least Matt hadn’t left Stella pregnant and then made her homeless.
“I’m not sure he led me on.” She turned and lay flat on her back facing the ceiling.
“I thought we were heading toward marriage and spending the rest of our lives together. Even when he ended things, I thought he was just having a bit of a freak out before making such a big commitment. I’d never really considered us split up and then . . . the invitation.”
“Jesus, that’s closure.”
“It was a shock.”
“What did you say to him. To Karen? How did they excuse what they’d done?”
More silence.
“Nothing,” she said. “I mean, I never asked him. Or her.”
I sat up. “You’ve never spoken to him about it? Not even when you got the invitation?”
“What was there to say? It wasn’t like I was going to talk him out of it or negotiate a wedding for myself instead. What would have been the point?”
“You could have done a lot of shouting, gotten it off your chest, let them know how you feel.” I wanted to do it for her.
She shrugged. “I’m already the kind of woman they think they can lie to and cheat on. I’m already the girl they invite to the wedding because they think I’ll be happy for them or something. Or they don’t care. I suppose I didn’t want to give them reason to respect me even less.”
“Who cares what they think? Either of them. They’re clearly people you don’t want anywhere near you. You should have confronted them for you, to make yourself feel better. Stand up to them. Don’t be the woman who takes everything they dish out with a smile.”
Tears welled in her eyes. I’d gone too far. I didn’t mean to call her weak. She was here—at her former best friend’s and ex-boyfriend’s wedding. With a smile. That took courage and strength. But it was okay to feel wronged. To be angry. I was angry for her.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just . . . people like them . . . they act as if it’s their world and we just live in it. Like we don’t matter. They’re so entitled or so they think. They don’t care who they mow down on the way to getting what they want.”
My mother was a victim of that entitled attitude—it still made me so angry. “You deserve more, Stella.”
“I’ve rehearsed it,” she said in a small voice almost as if she didn’t want me to hear it.
“What I’d say. To him and her. I didn’t sleep much in that first week after I got the invitation.
I had plenty of time to prepare a speech.
Probably spent more time on it than the father of the bride has on his. ”
“So, say it to them.”
She took a deep breath. “I’d end up getting tongue-tied and Matt would try to talk over me . . . and would I feel better?”
“You won’t know if you don’t try.”
“I think I’d prefer to just avoid him. He hasn’t come near me at this wedding. And as long as he doesn’t, I’ll be fine. I don’t want to be made to feel like the entire situation is my fault. And that’s what would happen.”
“You’ve not spoken to him at all while you’ve been here?”
She shook her head. “If I know him at all, he’s angry that I’ve come—despite the invitation.”
“Karen can’t keep away from you. I’ve seen her come up to you a few times.”
“Yeah, I’ve come close to saying something to her, but then I think I only have myself to blame.
Our entire lives, Karen has taken what she’s wanted, and I’ve never spoken out, never criticized her or told her what I really thought.
At school she made us swap beds because she didn’t want to be near the loo.
When we ate out in restaurants, she’d make me order a pudding and then she’d eat it herself.
She would borrow my clothes and not return them.
I’ve let that happen. For years. And I’ve done the same thing with Matt—I’ve wanted him to be happy more than I wanted me to be happy. ”
“You don’t know how to put yourself first,” I added.
“It sounds like a cliché.”
“It sounds true.”
“I think they just have such forceful personalities, and I genuinely want people I love to be happy.”
“But they’ve got to want you to be happy too, otherwise people will ride roughshod over you.
” It had happened to my mother—used when there wasn’t anything better to do and then dropped when life moved on.
It made me sick. “Promise me you’ll start pleasing yourself before you start pleasing other people. ”
“I can’t make promises that I don’t know I’m capable of keeping.”
“Promise you’ll at least try. And if Matt says anything about you coming to this wedding after what he’s done and then sent you an invitation . . . he’ll have me to contend with.”
“You’re going to be my knight in shining armor?” she asked.
“No swords. I’m going to tell him what a useless human being he is.”
She turned back toward me and placed her warm, soft hand over my arm. “Please don’t say a word. I’ve managed to avoid him so far—that’s all I’ve got to do until we leave on Sunday.”
“He better keep away from you.”
I couldn’t stand up to the man who’d discarded my mother like she was nothing because he was dead, but if Matt even breathed in Stella’s direction, I couldn’t hold myself responsible for what I’d do.
“Promise me you won’t say anything,” she pleaded.
“Stella, I can’t make promises that I don’t know I’m capable of keeping,” I said, replaying her words back to her.
“Don’t think I haven’t seen that steel in you. I know you are perfectly able to control yourself if that’s what you want to do.” She slid her hand over mine. “Don’t think I’m not grateful. Just you wanting to protect me is . . .” She sighed. “More than Matt ever did.”
“But why should I control myself? That guy needs some home truths—”
“For me. That’s why.”
With those two words she’d stolen the wind from my sails.
For her.
It was a simple reason, but the best. And one that couldn’t be argued with.
“I promise I won’t say anything,” I said. For her—she was worth the promise.
For her, I’d keep decades of frustrations locked up and wouldn’t unleash them on Matt, however tempting it was.
For her, I wasn’t sure if there was anything I wouldn’t do.