*

Four hours later and one floor below them, Nina gingerly opened her eyes, without a clue as to where she was. Her eyes felt glued together and she remembered her contact lenses, and her fake eyelashes and the layers of primer and shadow and highlighter caked over her eyelids by the make-up artist yesterday. Why was she at the hotel? She rolled over. Jules was next to her, her lip cut, one eye dark and swollen. Wow, she must’ve had a skinful, Nina thought.

She made it to the bathroom, her legs shaking as she did a wee. The longer her eyes were open, the worse she felt. She checked the time: just after 6 a.m. She performed her usual early morning routine – a large glass of water and painkillers – and climbed back into bed, falling straight to sleep.

A few hours later she heard something clunking near her head and opened her eyes to see Jules setting down a cup of coffee – black, as Nina liked it – her face set in a frown. This time when Nina saw Jules’s black eye, she remembered. Oh shit. She groaned and covered her face with her hands.

Jules sat on the edge of the bed.

‘Do you want to tell me what’s going on?’ is all she said.

The day and the night – and the previous night – came back to Nina in crashing waves of mortification. She curled up into herself, pulled the duvet over her head and from beneath it told Jules everything.

‘How could you?’ Jules asked, in a bewildered tone so foreign she didn’t sound like Jules at all.

‘I love him,’ Nina repeated, over and over. ‘I’ve always loved him.’

Jules sat beside her as her tears fell, not condoning her behaviour but not condemning it either. A gesture Nina would never forget. ‘I know,’ she said simply. ‘I know.’

They sat together for some time, Nina in a white waffle bathrobe with her knees pulled up and her arms locked round her legs. Jules, dressed already in jeans, a shirt and a blazer, stared at the wall and every now and then delicately touched the swollen area around her eye with her fingertips. She needed to get back to London, she was hoping to see her father this afternoon, but how could she leave Nina like this?

‘I’m going to tell Alice,’ Nina resolved. ‘I don’t want to ruin their marriage, but she deserves more. More than both of us…’ Her voice grew watery and thin. ‘I know I don’t deserve her friendship any more.’

*

The thing about not drinking, the thing about spending a lifetime observing people to try to fit in, as Jules had done, is you notice stuff. Like a bride raising a champagne flute to her lips and setting it back down without taking a sip, swapping it with her new husband’s less full glass. Like a bride surreptitiously avoiding all the blue cheese in her salad course. Like a bride whose breasts are just slightly fuller, her corset requiring the tiniest fraction less tightening, the distance between the ribbons imperceptibly wider.