Piglet

by Lottie Hazell

He would tell her thirteen days before their wedding, and she would feel his words lodge like a shard of bone between her ribs.

There were some things that you could not tell your friends. She knew that truths, once spoken, had the power to strip her of the life she had so carefully built, so smugly shared.

There were some things that you could not tell your family. She knew that truths, once spoken, had the power to return her to them.

Marriage is a commitment, but a lesser one than a mother has to her son.

When she asked herself what was worse—what he had done, or what it would be like for people to know what he had done—she was reassured by her inability to answer.

How do you tell people, when the invitations have been sent, the crème pâtissière made, that the fullness of your life has been a pretence; your pleasures, you realise, posture?

Because shouldn’t she be full now? Shouldn’t she be satisfied? Despite everything, she was hollow. She was hungry.

How to say that she had built a life that relied on the mirrors of others?

the creeping realisation that really, really, they had made their vows in the pursuit of living a life that looked good rather than felt good.

She had eaten her heart out. It had not changed a thing. And then, listening to her new husband’s speech about how they were meant to be, how he had known from the start, she had found herself, despite her gorging, hollow. The attention from their guests, their wedding-day admiration, had not filled her up. Her father’s pride, wrested from him, had been bitter; her in-laws’ approval soured. She had plumbed the depths of this shallow life they had constructed and found there was nothing left to do but leave it.

What did she want, she wondered afresh, and did it matter, as long as she could choose?