[Liam’s POV]
The ceiling is wrong. Ours at the flat is white. This one is textured oatmeal with a sprinkler head angled over my face, and my first thought, formed through a skull hosting a percussion ensemble, is that whoever specified that sprinkler despised his guests.
"Odette." I say her name before I am vertical, because we've shared a bed four years and she answers to the shape of it long before the vowels.
The bed answers by being empty. Her side hospital-cornered, mine a minor crime scene. I am in last night's shirt and nothing else, which, for a man who lays out his pyjamas on a valet stand, is a development.
I sit up too fast. The percussion becomes an orchestra. I try to build a sentence from the last twelve hours; the sentence keeps shedding its verbs halfway.
Rehearsal dinner. Father toasting about the Ashford men marrying well. Odette's hand on my elbow, the new nail varnish she'd chosen because it matched the napkins, which I mocked and she elbowed me for.
Matt pressing a whisky on me I didn't want and drinking anyway, because a best man's glass is a contract. Celine at the bar later, that careful smile: relax, Liam, tomorrow's the big day.
After that: gaps. A corridor carpet with a pattern I could not reproduce under oath. A door clicking shut, from which side I do not know.
I am a man with a calendar app and a father who told me a gentleman is punctual even to his own funeral. I do not have blackouts. I've had two. My twenty-first. This.
My suit is on the floor. Not hung. Not folded. Puddled, in the shape a garment assumes when stepped out of by a man who did not care where it landed. My hands have a tremor they are not authorised to possess.
Clock reads 09:47. Ceremony at eleven. My phone sits face down, cobwebbed with cracks I don't recall installing. Seventeen missed calls. Fourteen Matt, three my mother, none Odette.
Matt picks up on the fourth ring, which on my wedding morning is three too many, a matter I'll raise once I've located my bride.
"Mate, where the hell are you? We've been calling since—" His voice comes through thick with something I can't identify, halfway between hungover and frightened.
"Matt. After the bar last night. Where did I go." My voice is level in the way voices go level when their owner is managing a small fire in a warehouse of petrol.
"You don't remember." He says it slowly, the way one says it to a concussion patient whose answer might later be legally relevant.
"I would not be ringing you, Matthew, if I remembered." My voice has found the register my father uses on caddies who recommend the wrong club.
"You were fine. I bought you one, Celine bought you one, Tom did the shot. Then you said you were going up. You weren't going to be the groom who threw up in the vestry. I walked you to the lift. You pressed your floor. The doors closed. We figured you'd gone to bed. Mate, is Odette not there? She's at the hotel across—"
"She's not here." I say it to the oatmeal ceiling. I say it to the sprinkler. I say it to a room that is not my room in a hotel I did not choose.
"Matt. Was there a woman?" The question leaves my mouth, and I'd give a great deal to call it back before he answers.
"Liam, there's always women at a bar. You were fine. You told me, I quote, you were the luckiest bastard in London. Get moving. You are not, currently, a man prepared for photographs." The line dies. He has hung up on the groom, which is either a friendship-ending offence or a mercy, and I cannot say which.
I stand with one shoe on and a tremor in my hands, and a cold thing unrelated to the air conditioning travels up my spine. I have been the luckiest bastard in London four years. I do not forget my bride.
The shower does its best, which is insufficient. I nick my jaw shaving, because my father's voice is louder than the orchestra, and a gentleman marries a woman with a clean jaw.
The A40, against precedent, is merciful. I do ninety in a sixty and it does not occur to me to care, which is its own diagnostic. My phone does not ring. Odette does not ring.
I see the steeple first, grey through the trees, and my stomach performs a manoeuvre stomachs are not licensed to perform without consultant approval.
The car park is emptying. A Bentley I paid for is pulling out. A woman from the rehearsal dinner slides into a Mercedes with her heels in one hand, and looks at me in a way I will replay for months.
Inside, the flowers are there. The quartet isn't. An elderly usher I cannot name looks at me with the particular expression the English reserve for funerals and other men's catastrophes.
"Mr. Ashford. The coordinator is inside. I think you'd better—" His voice is the gentle, professional voice of a man who has witnessed something he was not paid to witness.
Fiona has the clipboard, the headset, and the expression of someone paid a great deal to manage a crisis she was not briefed on, which, I suppose, is the job.
"Liam." She uses my first name, which she has never done, which indicates we've entered the category of conversation that dispenses with surnames. "Sit down."
"Where is she?" My voice has gone thin, the thin a voice goes when money has stopped solving a thing it always solved.
"She left. Forty-five minutes ago. She walked out of the bridal suite, through the side door, got in her car, and drove." Her voice is level. "She was still in her dress."
Cold water pools behind my knees, and I sit, because the pew is closer than the floor, and the floor is not an option an Ashford takes, even one whose bride took one instead.
"Why did she—" The sentence runs out of track before its station, a failure I have not witnessed in myself since I was seven and my pony died.
Celine is at the end of the aisle, the first thing this morning that resembles somewhere safe to put my weight.
She is in the pale grey bridesmaid dress we agreed on in February, mascara in two neat tracks, her hand reaching for me before she has crossed the aisle.
"Liam. Oh god, Liam, where were you—" Her voice is cracked in the middle, the way voices crack when they've been holding something difficult for hours.
She drops beside me. Her hand goes to my forearm the way her mother's used to go on her father's at funerals, and I permit it, because I do not have the muscle tone to refuse.
"Celine. What happened?" I cannot modulate. I cannot be the gentleman. The question leaves me without the polish my father has spent thirty years applying.
"Liam." Her eyes are wet. Her eyes are also steady, a combination I will, at my considerable leisure, think about later. "I need to show you something. And I am so sorry."
She takes out her phone, and she does it slowly, with the care reserved for objects that must be handed over but not dropped.