‘Don’t remind me.’ Max sighed. ‘Though I think it’s worth it for this one.’ He looked across the room at Verity, an expression of rapture on his face. ‘I still can’t quite believe she said yes.’

Chloe looked at Verity’s left ring finger, white against the dark red ruby flanked by two square diamonds on a gold band. With anyone else, she’d have squealed and demanded to be told all the details of the proposal, but now she just couldn’t. Her stomach was churning, bile tickling the softness at the back of her throat. She had seen that ring before.

It had looked better on Zadie. Mind you, everything always did. She had had this way about her, this way of injecting life into anything she touched.

Verity must have seen where Chloe was looking because she lifted her hand and said, ‘Lovely, isn’t it?’

Chloe murmured her agreement, forcing her words out. ‘Is it antique?’ she asked, knowing what the answer would be.

‘It’s a family ring,’ said Verity. ‘One of a kind. It’s been in the bank since Max’s great-grandmother died.’

Chloe took a sip of the champagne, trying to forget herself and Zadie, nineteen years old and high as kites, finding the ring in Max’s room and screaming as Zadie tried it on, jumping up and down and yelling the words ‘bride’ and ‘bridesmaid’. But as she pushed that memory away it was replaced by another one. The same ring on Zadie’s bloodied finger, as she lay on the bedroom floor.

Chloe felt herself burn with an anger she had spent fifteen years trying to extinguish.

He really thought he had got away with it.

7

Then

Chloe had been to parties before of course. She hadn’t been especially beloved at school, but she hadn’t been reviled either and had always been invited along even if no one would really have noticed if she didn’t turn up. But parties at home had been bottles of cheap fizzy wine, lukewarm, in someone’s parents’ garden, before summoning the local taxi driver to take them to a club in town, and the driver then warning them several times that he always enforced the soiling charge. Chloe had usually stood on the outside of these gatherings, sitting in the front of the taxi, talking to the parents during the pre-drinks, never entirely sure where to put herself. This party was different. It belonged in an American TV show. The house might have looked grown-up earlier, but now it reeked of student. The garden was full of boys in T-shirts, despite the chill in the air. There were pretty girls with long hair and lace-edged vest tops sitting on every surface, cigarettes hanging from their delicate fingers.