Front Cover

ALSO BY ALEXIS HALL

LONDON CALLING

Boyfriend Material

SPIRES

Glitterland

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Part One

Chapter 1

I’VE NEVER SEEN THE POINT of hen parties. Though given my experiences of garden parties, dinner parties, and fancy dress parties, it might be that I just don’t like parties in general. Which, in retrospect, might explain why I spent so much of my party-boy years being miserable and hating myself. Personal growth. I was nailing it.

I was also nailing Bridge’s hen do. Or rather her non-gender-specific bird do, because she was never going to want her big prewedding bash to exclude half her friends. Also, since she’d made me her maid of honour, it would have meant excluding myself, which would have been weird. Even if, on some level, I might secretly have preferred an evening at home with my amazing barrister boyfriend.

My amazing barrister boyfriend who still felt like an amazing barrister boyfriend after two whole years.

My amazing barrister boyfriend who—on account of the amazing barrister part rather than the boyfriend part—was currently running late.

So there I was in the roped-off VIP area of an affordably swanky cocktail bar wearing a crocheted vulva hat. A bespoke crocheted vulva hat I’d commissioned from one of Bridge’s friends when I realised that bachelorette-party genital merch skewed strongly in the direction of all penis all the time. And, obviously, I could have just not had genitalia-themed decor at all, but then it wouldn’t have been a proper non-gender-specific bird do and that would have made Bridge sad. And making Bridge sad was something I wanted to avoid both in my capacity as maid of honour and in my capacity as her, y’know, friend.

James Royce-Royce plucked a dong-shaped lolly from the dong-shaped lolly jar. It was the first time I’d seen him, or his husband James Royce-Royce, without their newly adopted son in months. Their newly adopted son who they had, inevitably, named James. Although to avoid confusion, they just called him Baby J. “I must say, Luc,” he said. “I’m a little offended that you went with commercially produced phallic sweeties rather than asking for my contribution.”

Bernadette May, a relatively famous cookery book writer who Bridge had gone through so many work-related disasters with that they’d become friends out of sheer necessity, smouldered dismissively from across the table. She was one of those people who could smoulder at anything—and usually did. “That’s because your contribution would probably be a real horse’s penis rolled in saffron and finished with gold leaf.”