“I suppose ideally…” Bridge was shuffling uncomfortably, her coat drawn tight around her even though it was quite a mild spring evening. “Absolutely ideally, you’d have thought about it at least a little bit before you, you know, proposed?”

I looked up from where I’d been making an unconvincing go of pretending not to cry. “In case you haven’t noticed, Bridge, I’m not an ideally sort of person. And now I’m stuck because I’m getting married tomorrow, and I don’t think I actually want to get married tomorrow. But if I don’t, then I’ve destroyed the only good relationship I’ve ever had and probably ever will have.”

“You must have wanted to get married, though?” Bridge had that hopeful-but-disoriented tone she always got when she butted up against ideas that didn’t quite fit her view of the world. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t have asked him at all. This is just cold feet.”

“My feet aren’t the problem,” I told her. “The rest of me is. And I guess at the time I wasn’t thinking about the future. I just knew I wanted to be with Oliver and I wanted to show him that and I didn’t know how.”

Bridge was staring at me in a way I never wanted my best friend to stare at me. “What do you mean, you didn’t know how?” she asked. “You could have said, ‘I love you and want to be with you.’ Or…” Inspiration struck her. “Blow jobs. Men like blow jobs.”

“Sorry, are you saying my options were propose marriage or suck him off?”

“No,” said Bridge firmly. “The first thing I said you should do was tell him how you felt. And I think the fact that you blanked that option might mean something.”

“Oh God.” I grabbed at my hair. “I…I’m just not very good at expressing myself emotionally. It was right after Miles’s wedding and I was in a weird place and it’s really hard when you’ve been with someone a long time and it’s working really well but you’ve got no, like, way of showing or proving or—” I broke off. “And, anyway, he said yes. What kind of arsehole says yes to a proposal from a famously self-destructive person a couple of days after his ex-boyfriend’s wedding?”

“I don’t know,” said Bridge. “I suppose someone who loves you and supports you and wants to be with you no matter what.”

I gave another groan. The only thing that was stopping me from crying more was that I’d been sick enough that I was out of fluids. “I know. What a bastard.”