“You have got to be shitting me,” I hissed at my laptop. Been through a lot together? A trying month? As if he hadn’t been the architect of it all? His email said he worked for The Sun, and not his dream employer the Daily Mail, but that was small consolation for the fact that selling out his friends had given this infected wart of a human (nearly) everything he’d ever wanted.

I closed my eyes and inhaled. The morning of my Abbey wedding, my best friend Cilla had suggested maybe Clive would loom less scary to me if I reduced him to something more human, more fallible, by picturing him as he was before: Nick’s childhood friend, the kind and flirty guy I’d met at Oxford who’d been a hapless but hungry local reporter, writing about Tube station loos and the nun who claimed to see the Virgin Mary in a pancake, rather than a person who’d attempted to blackmail me.

But my mind’s eye couldn’t see that Clive anymore; all I could conjure was the bitter, twisted Clive who’d vibrated with spite when he confronted me and Nick about his claims that Freddie and I were having an affair. He was fueled by a lifetime of buried resentment and throttled hate. What did that Clive, the only Clive who would ever exist for me now, think he was doing emailing me?

My worst impulses won out, and I Googled him. He had tucked into his new gig with vigor: THE CHEAT, THE CAD, AND THE CUCKOLD, one of his headlines read, as if he were telling a bad joke over a whiskey. I snorted derisively.

I knew I should stop reading. But on the internet, you are only ever a few easy clicks from a horror show, and I could not turn away from mine. One story about Freddie at the opening of a distillery had me studying his face again for signs of stress, and that led me to an older one theorizing that he was drowning his sorrows in socialites. Another click took me to a report that Queen Eleanor might exile us. The tabloids had pulled whatever photos they had of me and Freddie and turned their body-language experts loose to find proof that he was checking me out, or vice versa. I fell further and further down the wormhole, all the way back to those grainy early morning photos of Freddie leaving my apartment, which Clive had used to bolster his claim of an affair. Eventually, I landed on the BBC’s video of my entire wedding—right down to its abysmal end. I’d never seen it. Why would I have? I’d lived it.

I hit play.

Everything started out brilliantly. The commentators lapped up the décor, swooned over my dress, and—in a twist of dramatic irony I would find delicious if it were on one of my soap operas—extolled me as a perfect future queen.

“She looks stunning,” the BBC lip-reader caught Freddie saying to Nick as I came up the aisle. “You’re a lucky man.”