Ghost of Exes at the Wedding

Chapter One

Belle

The four-poster bed is absurd. It’s the kind of bed that someone might have died in.

Consumption, probably. Or a broken heart.

Hopefully, not the plague. It’s the kind of bed where you could conceal a body, with plenty of room underneath for you also to hide.

It is, according to the wedding coordinator, ‘original to the castle’.

Yes, I’ll be consummating my marriage in a bed that’s definitely seen things.

When I told my friends and family that we’d chosen a manor house in Whitby as our wedding venue, they all made the same joke about Dracula: ‘Let’s hope there aren’t vampire bats!’ I laughed every time. What else was I supposed to do?

But it’s also near the hometown of my love (as a born-and-bred Southerner, marrying a Yorkshireman was not on my life bingo card) and standing here now, looking out over the sea towards the abbey, something in me settles.

Everything in my life has led to this moment, and I’m exactly where I need to be.

Weeks of fittings, tastings, group chats, and the usual family carnage, and suddenly, it’s just me and my reflection.

I turn to the floor-length oval mirror with its ornate wooden trim – it’s probably also original to the castle and, note to self, undoubtedly also haunted.

Next to it is a dressing table buckling under eighteen months’ worth of skincare; proof that self-improvement is an ongoing project.

The woman staring back at me is doing her best. White silk midi-dress: check.

Blazer tailored to her curves and buttoned exactly where the stylist said: check.

Long, bouncy, reddish curls cooperating for once in their life: check.

I lean in closer, studying her face, hunting for disasters.

The small freckles are staging their usual rebellion through the foundation.

The left eye is starting to water slightly, which means I’m more stressed than I’m admitting.

But the lips are good. The lips are actually perfect.

It’s taken a while – therapy, trial and error, and more re-watches of Sex and the City than I care to admit, but I am proud of the woman I’ve become.

The woman in that mirror is smart, reliable, and successful.

She knows what she wants, and she gets it.

And because of that, she’ll make the perfect wife tomorrow.

A wife! The fact this is actually happening still hasn’t fully sunk in.

Tomorrow I am marrying the love of my life.

The ring on my finger sparkles in the reflection, and I catch myself smiling like an idiot.

I kissed some frogs, sixty-nined some toads, and had sex with worse, but I found my prince – and in fewer than twenty-four hours from now, I’ll be walking down the aisle to my Timothy.

Timothy, with his dark brown eyes that crinkle when I crack a joke, who holds me like he means it and makes me feel safe.

Timothy, whose hands are always steady, assured, and never shake, even with a full restaurant watching.

Timothy, who cuts vegetables like he’s performing surgery.

Timothy, who is kind, successful, and wants the same things I want. The algorithm finally got it right.

Behind me, the wedding dress of my dreams hangs on the door of the antique mahogany wardrobe.

An off-the-shoulder, long-sleeved, beaded bodice gives way to a buttery soft, floor-length, silk gown – accompanied by a white, faux fur shoulder shrug.

I checked the forecast one last time on my way here, and it’s true: I’m going to get the white wedding I always dreamed of, with snow expected at midday tomorrow.

But I can’t get too carried away – we still have this evening to go first. Tonight’s the wedding rehearsal dinner slash party in the grand dining room of the manor house.

This place is gloriously romantic (in a Wuthering Heights kinda way) and the chapel on its grounds, with its domed ceiling and huge stained-glass windows, looks exactly like one in my secret ‘wedding’ Pinterest board that I’ve had saved since 2015.

Alongside all the excitement, I’d be lying if I said the idea of everyone we love being in the same room didn’t terrify me a bit too. What if no one gets on? What if it’s skin-crawlingly awkward? What if no one even turns up?

I lean towards the mirror and reach for my lipstick.

Neutral ground, something I can actually control.

I reapply a light layer and blend it out with my fingers, when there’s a knock at the door.

I check the time: I’m only halfway through my allotted thirty minutes for getting ready.

So who could possibly want me? Timothy knows better than to go off schedule – his industry press are here to shoot our first look at the rehearsal and things need to go perfectly.

My wedding is the one occasion I get to make an exceptional entrance (or three), and I plan to milk every single one.

The door handle starts turning, so I run over before it opens, shouting, ‘Who is it?’ while sweat prickles at my pits.

‘Only me!’ calls the one person I would want to hear from right now – the cosiest, most familiar voice, full of that soft Scottish lilt that makes even a shouted warning sound like a hug.

It’s Grandma Jules (although I’m the only one allowed to call her that – to everyone else, she’s Juliet).

She barges in at just under five feet, but enormous in every other sense, wearing a yellow dress covered in something between flowers and chaos, her signature rose-shaped earrings already jingling before she’s fully through the door.

Jules is the complete opposite of a stereotypical granny; she always has the latest smartphone, loves social media more than I do, and is fiercely independent.

She doesn’t need anyone to help her put up a shelf, just a good old YouTube tutorial and a hearty mug of tea.

As she struts into the room, her silver hair almost creates a disco-ball effect on the walls (she hates a purple rinse and never misses an opportunity to gossip about the old dears in her book club who rely on them).

She stops dead when she sees me, one hand pressing flat to her chest, then puts down the papers clasped under her armpit on the haunted bed.

‘Well, don’t you look beautiful, Belle. Just like your namesake.’ I notice her lip quiver a little, and she blinks hard like she’s annoyed at herself for it.

‘Oh, please don’t set me off!’ I laugh and my hands rush to either side of my face, a desperate attempt to stop myself tearing up.

‘Sorry, sorry, hen! You know what I’m like, a sucker for love!’ I pull her into a hug and breathe her in – that herby, citrus scent she’s worn as long as I can remember, nostalgic in a way that takes me straight back to childhood and also exactly how I imagined the Sixties to smell.

She seems small in my arms. Grandad used to call her slim, used to say she had the energy of three women, despite her size.

He’d have loved today – any excuse to get his good suit out and embarrass everyone on the dance floor.

I press my cheek to her silver hair and don’t let myself think about the gap at the top table tomorrow, where he should have been.

Sensing her still, I step back and hold her at arm’s length. ‘Is everything okay, Grandma?’ I study her face. ‘Are the photographers downstairs getting ready?’

‘Oh yes, yes! They’re setting up now, some very fancy lights they’ve got …’ she says, waving her hands in the air.

‘I can’t tell you what a stress it’s been, knowing the press are photographing it. As if I wasn’t nervous enough already! I mean, it’s very flattering, of course, but Fork Yeah catering magazine isn’t exactly Vogue Weddings.’ Jules nods, but I can tell she’s distracted.

‘I wanted to just run something past you quickly first,’ she says, picking the papers back up.

Between the two seating plans – one for tonight’s rehearsal dinner and one for tomorrow, because Timothy insisted they both be ‘proper’ – and Fork Yeah’s photographers lurking downstairs, I’ve spent the last three days drowning in place cards and table numbers.

One of my brows (yes, just the one – she has a mind of her own and we call her Browelle) raises as I watch Jules leaf through her stack of papers: the colour-coded timetable for this evening, guests’ dietary requirements and, on a separate page, the handwritten table plan for tonight.

I roll my eyes and turn back to the mirror, smoothing out the crease left by Browelle on my forehead.

‘How many times do I need to say it, Grandma? No, Great-uncle Norman can’t have another plus one.’

I watch her reflection in the mirror, bringing the paper closer to her face to inspect it again.

With her other hand, she nervously twirls the rings on her ring finger.

‘It’s not that, hen. Something is very strange, is all,’ she mutters under her breath, her perfectly manicured nails, painted neon pink, flicking through the sheets.

‘Here, let me see,’ I say walking over, ‘I’m sure it’s nothing.’ She holds the papers out in front of me and I lean closer. I scan the page for a moment, and everything seems in order: Mum, Dad, future family, my besties – all written in Jules’s neat script … Until I notice it, and my heart drops.

I see the scrawl first, before my brain catches up.

Jake Marleigh.

It’s not just the name, it’s the handwriting – the scribble of it, two words that I haven’t seen written down in years.

The slant of the J that hooks too far left and the E that almost disappears within the K, like whoever wrote it was in a rush.

My fingers trace the letters – muscle memory from past Valentine’s Day cards, love notes, and that time he wrote ‘I love you’ on the back of a receipt, which I kept in the back of my phone case for two years.

I lean in closer, blinking in the hope that those two words disappear like invisible ink. They don’t.

Jake Marleigh. My ex-boyfriend.