The Guest List

by Lucy Foley

This evening’s will be a more refined take on the usual recipe, as this is a refined group we have staying. Or at least I suppose they like to think of themselves as such. We’ll see what happens when the drink hits them.

The bride didn’t bat an eyelid at the expense. I believe she’s used to having the best of everything.

people round I end up throwing stuff in cupboards and cramming them closed, so that it feels like the whole place is holding its breath, trying not to explode.

We couldn’t be more different, Jules and I. The two most important women in my husband’s life.

It could also be to do with Will’s stag party. Charlie went, which seemed all wrong, as he’s Jules’s friend. He

Cause … well, don’t tell me you haven’t noticed?” “Johnno, she’s nineteen, for Christ’s sake,” Will says. “Don’t be disgusting. Besides, she also happens to be my fiancée’s sister.”

haven’t seen all that much of Will recently. Yet he’s the person who knows more about me than anyone in the world, really. And I know the most about him.

Almost as if they wanted to be heard.

But the sting of it focuses everything to a point, to the metal entering my flesh, so that for a moment nothing else exists. I breathe a little easier. Maybe I’ll do one more—

I thought I was in love when I was about her age.”

I think of Charlie at eighteen: the deep biscuit tan, the white line sometimes visible beneath his board shorts. It occurs to me that my mother never knew—or cared to know—about my adolescent affairs of the heart.

Through the window I hear the sound of a boat’s engine guttering. It must be Charlie arriving. Charlie will make me feel better. I put the candle back down.

I wonder if Charlie’s embarrassed to be turning up with me in the state I’m in. He always gets a bit funny around Jules.

Charlie ignores me. “We’ll be staying in there. It should be fun. And it’ll be a nice distraction, won’t it? I know this month’s always tough.”

Sometimes, since the kids, it’s as though we’re more like colleagues, or partners in a small, somewhat shaky start-up that we have to devote all our attention to, rather than lovers.

Jules, the other woman in Charlie’s life. The most significant woman in his life—until I came along. They hug for a long time.

shaking in my boots rn

top. Of course it would be Ellie’s latest post. It’s like they’re mocking me. The comments underneath: You GUYS! OMG sooooo cute. mum + dad #mood so can we assume its official now, yeh? *winks*

It’s a strange thing when you consider that the dead on this island far outnumber the living, even now that some of the guests have arrived. Tomorrow will redress the balance.

big cormorant perched on the highest part of the ruined chapel, its crooked black wings hung open to dry like a broken umbrella. A cormorant on a steeple: that’s an ill omen. The devil’s bird, they call it in these parts. The cailleach dhubh, the black hag, the bringer of death. Here’s hoping that the bride and groom don’t know this … or that they aren’t the superstitious sort.

takes me a moment to realize that it’s the bride and another man: one of the couple that Mattie brought across on the boat. The two of them are sitting very close together, their heads touching, talking in low voices. They don’t exactly spring apart on noticing my entrance, but they do move a few inches away from one another. And she takes her hand off his knee.

proximity. I was aware when I walked over of his gaze raking my face, quickly up and down my person, before he went back to finishing his anecdote. So I am looking good. A guilty thrill goes through me.

It reminds me—I know it’s totally inappropriate to say this—but it reminds me most of that feeling you get when you start to suspect that someone you’re attracted to fancies you back.

“Who do we know who went to Edinburgh, Han?” Charlie says. I stiffen. How can he possibly have forgotten who it was? Then I see his expression change to one of horror as he realizes his mistake. “You know someone?” Will says. “Who?” “She wasn’t there for very long,” I say quickly.

As I do I catch sight of something that makes my blood run cold. There is someone at the window, looking in at us out of the blackness, observing silently. The face is pressed against the glass, its features distorted into a hideous gargoyle mask, its teeth bared in a horrible grin. As I continue to stare, unable to look away, it mouths a single word. BOO. I’m not even aware of the champagne glass leaving my hand until it explodes at my feet.

i mean it was a bit of an overreaction from her, dropping her glass like that. Did she really have to make such a scene? I stifle my annoyance

She’s kind, Hannah. That is one of the things I know about her. It sort of … spills out of her. I remember meeting Hannah for the first time and thinking: oh, that’s who Charlie wants. Someone nice. Someone soft, and warm. I’m too much for him. I’m too angry, too driven. He would never have picked me.

“Oh wow. I suppose that makes sense, because it was you who organized the stag, right?” She smiles at me. I wonder how much she knows about it.

didn’t tell her anything about what went down. I’m not surprised. I probably wouldn’t if I were him, come to think of it. The less said about all of that the better. Let’s hope he’s decided to let bygones be bygones on that front. Poor bloke. It wasn’t my idea, all of that.

But I could swear, on the couple of times I have seen him drunk, that it is like my husband has been taken over by someone else. That’s what makes it all the more frightening. Over the years I’ve learned to spot the smallest signs. The slight slackening of his mouth, the drooping of his eyelids. I’ve had to learn because I know that the next stage isn’t pretty. It’s like a small firework has suddenly detonated in his brain.

“Are you saying that you would have made me happier?”

When he knows how raw I feel at the moment. I have a sudden frightening urge to pick up the hardback on the nightstand and hit him over the head with it. It’s alarming, the rush of anger. It feels like I might have been harboring it for a while.

At the sound of his voice I feel it deep down inside, the powerful tug of my bond to him. When I look for something to compare my love for the kids with it’s actually not my love for Charlie. It’s animal, powerful, blood-thick. The love of kin. The closest thing I can find to it is my love for Alice, my sister.

She looked like someone with a terrible disease—like something was eating her from the inside out. And the worst part was that she didn’t think she could talk to anyone about what had happened to her. Not even me.

I think of the bodies in the bog. I imagine skeletal hands reaching up toward me from deep beneath the earth, ready to drag me down. And I begin to scrabble at the bank, using all my strength to haul myself upward,

I suppose a man like him is very sure of his sexual power. It reads as charm at first, but underneath there is something darker, more complicated. I don’t think he is actually attracted to me, nothing like that. He put his hand on my shoulder because he can. Perhaps I’m reading too much into it. But it felt like a reminder that he is the one in charge, that I am working for him. That I must dance to his tune.

Will grins at us all, shrugs. “Never did anything wrong.” “Bollocks!” Femi cries. “You got away with murder. You never got caught. Or they turned a blind eye, with your dad being head and all that.” “Nope,” Will says. “I was good as gold.” “Well,” Angus says, “I’ll never understand how you aced those GCSEs when you did no fucking work.” I shoot a look at Will, try to catch his eye—could Angus have guessed?

I remember the blood after the “procedure,” which is what they called it. They said that “a little light spotting” would be totally normal. But it went on for weeks, it felt like; the dark brown stain appearing in my knickers, like something inside me was rusting away.

So I didn’t tell Olivia how one June, two months after she came home from uni, Alice took a cocktail of painkillers and pretty much anything else she could find from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom while my mum was collecting me from netball practice. How, seventeen years ago this month, my beautiful, clever sister killed herself.