Chapter 8
The evening came back to Hannah piece by piece, in painful flashes that synchronised with the pounding of her skull. She lay in bed, the inside of her mouth tacky with dehydration, as various horrors presented themselves.
Ed and Joe weren’t just living together – they were engaged.
Her twin was marrying Jude’s brother.
Jude himself was apparently back from Australia for an ‘extended visit’ and living on the same street as her mum.
He would be Joe’s best man, while she would be her brother’s best woman.
Her stomach lurched, and she turned over to look at her alarm clock. It was 7.56 a.m.
God, her head was hurting.
After lunch yesterday afternoon, she’d done the only thing she could think of to calm her racing, furious mind: taxied into Buxton, the nearest sizeable town, and got rip-roaringly drunk with Charlie.
Fortunately, neither of them had much to do today that couldn’t be managed from a sofa.
Mondays were often days off for the pair of them, since they worked so many weekends – and today she was extra glad of this fact.
Hannah sat up and gulped from the glass of water she’d somehow had the foresight to place on her bedside table last night.
On top of her lunchtime champagne, she’d sunk a silly amount of cider, then cocktails, then tequila shots .
. . and she was now forced to conclude that none of it had mixed well.
But what alternative had there been? Should she have sat alone in her flat all night, miserably wondering how she’d navigate her way around the emotional landmines the next few months would present?
For her, Ed and Joe’s engagement was little short of a nightmare, but she knew that, for her brother, it was a dream: the fulfilment of a wish she was beginning to understand he’d held dear since his teens.
In their youth, Joe had been a mysterious, mercurial figure.
When he joined their school sixth form, he’d immediately become its most eligible bachelor – and though Hannah hadn’t been much bothered about boys at the time, within a year or two she could see the appeal of his singular insouciance.
Unlike Jude, whose approach to school life could best be summed up as ‘head down, grades up’, Joe made no effort whatsoever to fit in.
He read books the school library wouldn’t stock, held controversial opinions on almost everything, listened to obscure music and refused to follow fashion.
All this was deemed cool rather than weird because he was also stupidly handsome: dark, brooding and as tall as most grown men.
When she looked back, Hannah could see that Ed’s wide-eyed reactions to Joe were a key reason she hadn’t been at all surprised when he’d informed her he liked boys as well as girls.
Yesterday, it had finally dawned on her that the crush Ed had at fourteen had run far deeper, and lasted far longer, than she knew.
Nevertheless, the prospect of being thrown back into regular contact with Jude – of being his counterpart in their brothers’ wedding – felt impossible to her after the way things had ended between them.
Not to mention the way he’d blanked her at the conference.
As Charlie had said last night, over Hannah’s third – or was it fourth?
– whisky sour, this was the sort of thing that happened in films or on TV, not in real life.
At some point in the past couple of years, Hannah had genuinely begun to believe she would never see Jude again – and while the idea had been bleak, it had also offered a weird kind of consolation.
Not having him in her life anymore was tough, but it was a sort of daily-grind awful she’d learned to cope with.
Conversely, his reappearance for a principal role in her twin’s nuptials was a calamity she wasn’t equipped for.
How was she supposed to stand opposite him, spectating as their siblings tied the knot, when she’d once cherished a hope that she might one day walk up an aisle to find him awaiting her?
How could she possibly adjust to a future in which the only man she’d ever loved was recast as her brother-in-law?
She took another sip from her glass and immediately regretted it. The water was tepid, and Hannah felt suddenly, powerfully nauseous as it hit her stomach – which only began roiling more insistently as she remembered something else.
What was it Joe had said, champagne flute in hand?
That the wedding would be in September, assuming the event planner he’d engaged could get the job done?
He’d glanced her way, and this brief look was all the confirmation she had needed: the anonymous wedding enquiry she’d received last week, as well as the ￡3,000 deposit she’d since accepted to secure the date, had come from him.
As Hannah had stared at Joe from the other side of the table, she’d noted that he at least had the decency to look sheepish – though not so abashed that she thought he regretted what he’d done.
The revelation that her exciting, mysterious, big-budget wedding enquiry had come from Joe had shocked her – but on reflection, it wasn’t surprising.
He was arch and clever; better able than anyone she’d ever met to think three steps ahead in a situation.
He’d scoped out the date surreptitiously, knowing full well that if she’d been aware the email she’d received was about his wedding to Ed, she might have decided to lie and swerve the job.
The churning in Hannah’s gut intensified as the facts came flooding back to her.
Was she going to be sick?
Maybe.
Probably?
Shoving her duvet aside, she staggered to her flat’s tiny bathroom and sank to the floor, welcoming the coolness of the plain white tiles against her cheek.
She took deep, shuddering breaths and tried to work out whether she should laugh or cry.
Furious as she was with Joe, she felt sure he’d done this for her brother’s sake.
After their father had left them, and as Mum juggled running the house with long shifts at the hospital, Hannah had become chief party planner for all her siblings’ birthdays.
She’d also arranged Halloween celebrations and costumes, packed holiday-themed lunchboxes and taken decorating the house for Christmas very seriously.
She was a born organiser with a clear talent for spotting the fine details that could take an experience from fun to unforgettable, and have it perfectly fit whoever it was for.
Long before she’d become an events professional, Ed had said he wanted her to plan his wedding, should the need ever arise.
Under present circumstances, he would never have asked her – and, anticipating this reticence, Joe had sidestepped his fiancé’s sensitivity, manipulating Hannah into fulfilling a childish promise that no sane person would relish keeping.
She hauled herself up into a sitting position and put her face in her hands. Ugh. Her forehead felt clammy with sweat and a faint, boozy odour seemed to be emanating from her pores.
Over the past four years, Hannah had made a good fist of rebuilding her life after feeling like the roof had fallen in.
She’d launched a business that had achieved year-on-year growth from its inception; she’d rented this small but affordable one-bed so she could save for a mortgage, which she was now tantalisingly close to applying for.
She’d made new friends, she’d dated – she hadn’t shut herself away.
And if she hadn’t ‘opened up’ in the way some of the men she saw had hoped she might, Hannah didn’t think she could be blamed.
Yet refusing to plan Ed and Joe’s wedding would cast doubt on the structural integrity of all that she’d achieved: on everything, and every part of herself, she’d fought so hard to construct or repair.
She was going to have to do it, she realised.
As this grim thought settled on her like a dead weight, there was a knock at her front door.
Just what she needed. It was probably her elderly neighbour, Mrs Kinsella, wanting help with some digital emergency; at eighty-one, the woman was still as sharp as a tack, but the vagaries of her dodgy broadband connection regularly baffled her.
With some effort, Hannah stood and then made her way to the door. When she opened it, she was surprised to find Ed on the other side.
‘You look terrible,’ he said – and Hannah knew he was stating fact, rather than casting a cruel aspersion.
‘Cheers,’ she sighed. ‘Good morning to you, too.’ She stepped aside to let him in, immediately annoyed by how fresh, fragrant and bright-eyed he was.
Hannah wore her scrappiest sleep shorts and an ancient t-shirt with a photo of a grumpy-looking cat and the caption ‘Rage Consumes Me’.
Even in her current state, she knew it wasn’t a good look.
‘Why aren’t you at work?’ Hannah demanded, keen to spend as little time as possible on the back foot.
‘INSET day,’ Ed stated blandly. ‘I’m working from home – well, Mum’s.
Don’t need to dial in to my first meeting until ten.
’ Then, without preamble or permission, he strode to the kitchen and set about making a cafetière of coffee.
Though it was months since he’d been in Hannah’s flat, he knew precisely where to find all the things he needed.
He set everything out on the counter, then eyed her as the kettle boiled, a pained expression on his face.
‘I’m sorry, Han,’ he said. ‘I should have spoken to you about the engagement first. You shouldn’t have found out alongside everyone else.’
‘No,’ she said firmly, ‘I shouldn’t. It was a clear violation of the Twin Code, which is supposed to be sacred.’ As she said the words, she discovered her outrage at Ed’s contravention of this childhood honesty pact was genuine. Nothing could justify a communications fail this significant.
Without answering her, he turned to pour hot water into the French press. The kitchen air sang with the rich, intense smell of coffee, and Hannah couldn’t help inhaling greedily.