Diana’s meagre shape was visible in the bed behind me, her head sunk into the pillow. It’s not as though she was watching us—she rarely seemed to wake anymore—but I wished we could do this somewhere else.

“Do you think any of them will fit?” I said doubtfully.

Cory glowered and rifled through the bagged-up dresses. He hadn’t smiled all morning—not even to himself—and it was making me nervous. Neither of us had slept for several nights in a row, and there was an edginess—a faint hysteria—around, which felt like an infection of the atmosphere; like something noxious we were both breathing in. I could practically taste it on my tongue.

Whenever Cory was unable to sleep he got up and paced the floor, whereas I lay still with the duvet over my ears. Somehow his footsteps kept time with my pulse—or was it the other way round? Either way, his bare feet beat inside my brain all night, every night—up and down, back and forth, round and round. This morning, at first light, I saw him standing with his head held high and his hand on his heart, as if he were on a stage, accepting applause. I almost sat up and clapped, just to make him squirm.

“This one,” he said now, with conviction, pulling the plastic cover away.

It was a white dress—high-necked, long-sleeved, lacy and beribboned—that had faded over the years to ivory. In anyone else’s company I’d have risked a Wuthering Heights joke and hummed a few lines of Kate Bush, but Cory was frowning and glancing at the clock.

“Very virginal,” I said drily, expecting him to laugh or contradict me, but he said nothing. He was miles away. I checked the mirror in case Diana was watching us, but there was no movement from the bed, so I undressed and slipped the dress over my head. Cory zipped it up at the back.

Well, the fit was all right. It was the colour—or lack of it—that looked all wrong. There was something terribly tired—tired to the point of sickness—about the yellow-white lace at the wrists, and the yellow-white collar, and the yellow-white pallor of my own face.

“You look beautiful,” said Cory breathlessly, like an actor speaking a predictable line in a predictable film.

“I look like a ghost.”

As it happens, I didn’t have Stella in mind at that moment—or not consciously. She wasn’t the reason I said it. I chose the word ghost because it sounded marginally less facetious than corpse bride.

Cory turned his back on me abruptly, and continued flicking through the dress collection.

“What are you talking about? What ghost?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I backpedaled rapidly. “Any old ghost. What about that one? The red one?”