Before I Do(8)
“No! Are you sure you’re not seeing things?”
“It’s him.”
“You haven’t met Miranda’s boyfriend before?” Clara asked, slowly shaking her head. She looked uncharacteristically unnerved as she ruffled her neatly pinned hair, upsetting the sleek silhouette.
“He was a last-minute invite,” Audrey explained, sitting upright and then squeezing over on the toilet lid to make room for Clara. “Miranda rang us last week saying she couldn’t handle going to another wedding alone and could she bring a plus-one after all. She didn’t even tell me his name.”
“It can’t be that serious, then, if he’s so new on the scene,” Clara mused.
“What difference does it make how serious they are?” Audrey asked wildly.
They heard the main door to the bathroom swing open. Both women held their breath as someone else—possibly Debbie, from the sound of the slightly shuffled, high-heeled footsteps—came in to use the bathroom. Audrey and Clara looked at each other in silence as the unknown person used the cubicle next to them and then washed their hands while humming a tune. The tone of the hum, and the choice of song, “Get Me to the Church on Time,” confirmed the hummer’s identity to be Debbie. Once the bathroom door had swung closed again, Audrey and Clara exhaled in unison.
“You don’t still think about him, do you?” Clara asked. “That’s all ancient history.”
Audrey didn’t need to answer. She didn’t have to lie. Her face said it all.
“Shit,” said Clara.
Audrey picked up her handbag, which was resting on the cistern. She pulled out her wallet, the metallic silver purse she’d been using for the last ten years and miraculously hadn’t lost. Reaching inside the inner pocket, she pulled out the stack of photos she kept inside. There was the photo she’d taken of Josh at Covent Garden, then a photo of her and Josh together, laughing at a wedding, messing around with miniature paper parasols. There was a photo of her and Clara, aged eighteen, on their last day of school. Then there were the photos of him, of Photo Booth Guy. She had the original strip of photos she’d found at Baker Street all those years ago, and then the photos of them together. Six years had passed, and yet from what she had seen, he hadn’t changed at all; he had the same angular features, sharp green eyes, and blond, disheveled hair.
“You keep these in your wallet? Audrey, why?” Clara reached out and took the photos from her. “What if Josh found them?”
Audrey studied her hands, feeling sheepish. “I don’t know why I’ve kept them.”
“Does Josh know the story?” Clara asked, holding up the photos.
“No,” Audrey said, reaching to take the photos back and carefully returning them all to the folds of her wallet. It was complicated, the reason she’d kept them—a memento of one of the best weekends, but also one of the worst weekends, of her life, the weekend everything changed.
“Well, he’ll recognize you as soon as you walk out there,” said Clara. “What if he’s been carrying photos of you around in his wallet for the last six years? What if he’s been looking for you the same way you’ve been looking for him?”
The thought ignited some long-forgotten feeling in Audrey, a quiet flame she had been carrying for years.
“We have to go back out there, otherwise people are going to think you’ve got stomach problems,” said Clara.
“I can’t see him for the first time across a crowded dinner table. What if he does remember me? What if he recounts the story of how we met in front of everyone, what if—”
“What if you still feel like he’s your soul mate and sparks fly across the table in full view of your fiancé and his mother?”
Audrey knew Clara was being facetious, but when Clara saw the look on her face, she must have realized this was too close to the mark to be funny.
“Okay, so how do we avoid this?” Clara tapped her fingertips against her chin. “You need to get him alone first, preempt his reaction. You’ll just have to ask him not to mention that you know each other—explain it would be awkward for everyone involved. I’m sure he’ll understand. It’s your wedding!”
Audrey thought back on all the times she had looked for him in a crowd, imagined his face where it had not been. And now here he was, tonight of all nights. Could it be some strange serendipity? No. She tried to rein in her spiraling mind. It was simply an unfortunate coincidence. Like turning up to a party in the exact same dress as the host, or butt-dialing your soon-to-be mother-in-law during a particularly loud movie sex scene.
“You’re right.” Audrey clapped her hands. This was fixable. “We just need a plan.”
“This is Maid of Honor 101,” said Clara. “Remove angst, stress, and ex–love interests from the wedding.”
“I didn’t take that module. What do we do, set off a fire alarm? Create a diversion?”
“We just need to get him alone somehow.” Clara pursed her lips as she thought.
Together, they came up with Operation Wedding Plate. Clara would tell everyone that Audrey had nipped back to the church to fetch something. She would then ask the new arrivals to come outside one by one, to sign the wedding plate. This would allow Audrey a few minutes to talk to him, unobserved. It wasn’t a great plan, but it was the best they could come up with from the confines of a badly ventilated pub toilet. Hopefully, the guy wouldn’t even remember her, then Audrey could go back to worrying about regular wedding concerns, like aisle width, if the weather would hold, and the risk of falling bat corpses knocking out any of their guests tomorrow.