Page 72 of Wedding Crasher

Emily, barefoot and beautiful, an exotic flower tucked behind her ear. Of how she’d laughed at the way the wedding celebrant pronounced his surname, and how thrilled she’d been to finally share that name with him.

Of the love they’d made on that very same beach to consummate their marriage, beneath a blanket of stars so bright you could almost reach up to take one home as a souvenir.

He flipped the letter over again. He’d told Emily that he’d thrown it in the fire that night without reading it. He wished he had.

Did he really want to know what had driven Emily to the point of leaving him?

Did he want to rake it all up again, now that she was finally having a baby and they’d stepped back from the brink of disaster?

The baby.

He closed his eyes and sighed hard, the letter suddenly as lead-heavy as his heart. Inevitability swamped him. He already knew.

He traced his own name with his fingertip, scrawled across the front of the paper in Emily’s familiar looping handwriting.

Today was as good a day as any, because whatever lay in that letter didn’t have the power to destroy him any longer. Dora was right. They loved each other. They would weather this storm, no matter how rough the seas got.

He sat down on the edge of the bed, and opened the letter.

Dear Tom,

I’m so sorry that I’m not brave enough to do this face to face, but we seem to have lost the ability to talk to each other these days anyway, so maybe it’s for the best. I miss that so much. Talking, I mean. I miss you so much – even when you’re home, it’s like we’re strangers living under the same roof.

I’ve done something terrible, Tom, and it’s ripping me apart. I don’t even want to write it down because I know how much reading it will hurt you, but I have to because you deserve to know the truth.

I’ve slept with someone else. It was just once, and he means nothing to me, honestly, he doesn’t. I won’t try to make excuses, and I’m not asking for your forgiveness because I can’t forgive myself. I was just so desperately lonely, and he was kind to me. God, I wish I could wind the clock back and not do it, but life isn’t like that, is it?

I’m so sorry – for this, and for wanting a baby so much that I’ve let it rip our marriage apart. Jesus, Tom, how did it come to this?

You are the love of my life, it wasn’t supposed to end like this. I’m so ashamed of myself, and I won’t blame you if you decide that you can’t be with me anymore.

I’ve broken my own heart as well as yours, I’m sorry to the ends of the earth and back.

Love always,

Emily

x

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

‘Rupert, we need to talk.’

Hmmm. Too clichéd.

‘Rupert, did you lie to me about the fireworks on July 4th?’

Bad idea. Too confrontational.

‘Rupert. I don’t want to marry you.’

Too honest. Too true.

As she waited for Rupert to arrive at the chapel to take her to lunch, Marla ran through several other possible ways to open the conversation. Her stomach had been churning with nerves and questions had been buzzing around inside her head since she’d left Emily and Jonny in the pub last night.

The crunch of tyres on the gravel ratcheted her nerves up another notch, and she peeped out of the window just in time to see Rupert climb out of his sports car and cast a furtive look over towards the funeral parlour. As she watched, Melanie opened the door and gave Rupert a smug little wiggly finger-wave, and Marla felt her temper rocket from a low simmer to totally furious in two seconds flat.

By the time Rupert waltzed through the chapel doors, she’d backtracked on her plan for a civilised discussion over lunch and decided to just get things over with, here and now in the chapel.

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