Bridget’s friends were relying on me for a cosmo top-up, but right then my maid-of-honour duties seemed less important than my get-the-hell-out-of-there duties. The bar was too loud and too hot, and I needed some air. So I tucked my phone into my jeans and slunk off to sit outside and do some good old-fashioned feeling sorry for myself.

Except, as it turned out, even that was easier said than done because we were in fucking London, so sitting outside would have meant plonking my arse down on a pavement that approximately twenty-seven million people were trying to walk along at the same time, all desperately hurrying from wherever they had been to wherever they were going and not inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to someone getting in their way.

Not being quite self-loathing enough to let a whole city trample over me, I went to look for somewhere I could sit down and, because of the previously mentioned London issue, failed to find anywhere that wasn’t already occupied and wound up wandering into a badly lit park that, in a better state of mind, I’d have avoided for fear of being murdered and/or arrested.

And that was the point when I realised that my best friend had made me maid of honour for the wedding she’d been dreaming about since she was five, and I’d just bailed on her non-gender-specific bird do.

Fuck.

Fuckity, fuckity, fuck.

In a way it was comforting. People always worry that being in a relationship will change them, so it was good to know that being with Oliver hadn’t completely destroyed my ability to be a shitty friend. And a shitty boyfriend. And an all-around shitty person.

Fuck.

At last I found an empty bench and collapsed onto it like a sack of deeply shitty potatoes—the kind that have been left in the kitchen too long and are getting weird knobbly things growing out of them. Because that was me, wasn’t it? I was a knobbly-sprouting potato of a person. I’d been given the perfectly simple job of getting a bunch of people who liked each other to have a nice time in a bar full of fruity drinks and penis nibbles, and I’d managed to fuck even that up.

I checked my phone again.

Where are you?

Fuck. I’d fucked that up too.

WHERE RU ??!!?? RUOK???!

That wasn’t Oliver, that was Bridge. Which meant she’d noticed I was gone. Which meant I was making her special night—well, I suppose her actual special night was the wedding night, but her slightly less special night—all about me.

I pulled off my crocheted vulva hat and stared at it, and it stared back accusingly like a sexual Eye of Sauron.

Fuck.

I was the worst maid of honour ever.

Fuck.