THERE’D BEEN NO WORD FROM Tom by the following morning. Or, indeed, from Oliver. But then, I hadn’t texted him either. And it wasn’t because I didn’t want to. It was more that I couldn’t tell if we’d had a fight or not, and if we had, whose fault it had been. I mean, I had kind of dropped him on extra-special date night. Like a dick. Except I’d only done that because I needed to take care of my friend. Like definitely not a dick. Fuck. I was in a grey dick area.

Still, that was way better than wherever Bridge was. Which was a barely slept, woke up crying, increasingly convinced her fiancé was cheating on her area. We both called in sick because she was in no state to work and I wasn’t going to leave her in no state to work. And then we took a box of Frosties with us to the sitting room and huddled on the sofa together.

“I just don’t understand,” Bridge said through a mouthful of oversweetened breakfast cereal. “The wedding is next week. He can’t have just vanished. Vanished with a strange woman. Vanished with a strange woman and thrown his phone away.”

“And I’m sure he hasn’t,” I told her, although I wasn’t and hadn’t ever been and was getting less sure by the minute. “Something has probably come up at work.”

“Something that just happens to involve him putting his arms around women who aren’t me?”

I’d hoped sleeping on it would make things seem better, but it hadn’t. It had made them seem a whole lot worse. “How…how do you want to play this?” I asked. Because Bridge had made me her maid of honour, which meant it was my job help her plan her wedding or to help her burn it down if that was what she needed.

Bridge put down the Frosties and re-huddled into her blanket. “I don’t know. I just want to talk to him.”

At this point, I couldn’t tell if I was being supportive or useless. Honestly, it was a bit of both. “We could… Do you want to… Should we tell…people? I mean, our friends people. Not, like, strangers in the street.”

For a long while, Bridge stared at her phone. “Do you think they could help find him?”

I gave a deeply uncertain shrug. The thing about our friendship group—and I very much included myself in this—was that we were always helpful but rarely useful. “It can’t hurt.”

“I suppose…I suppose it’s worth a try.”