AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I thought you meant outside. You’re going to squeak your way down the aisle like one of those clowns-for-hire, Freya.”
She laughed, pulling up a stool. “Maybe. At least it’ll be funny.”
I blinked at her. “You’re really scaring me now.”
“Oh, stop. I know I’ve been a nightmare bitch, and I’m sorry. Truly. I got so wrapped up in the wedding that I forgot about what matters—the marriage. Grace helped me realise that this morning. The wedding is just the means to an end, and the end goal is that I get to spend the rest of my life with James.”
My lips pulled up on one side. “You should add that into your vows.”
Her face lit up. “Quick, pass me your laptop.”
I opened a new document and slid it over to her, and she quickly tapped it out onto the document and saved it.
“Can you email that to me later?”
“Of course. It’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said.”
She sighed and closed the document, then paused.
Shit. I’d been looking at our old photos. Dad had scanned them all to an online drive and various other physical storage methods in case the originals ever got lost, and the drive was what I was currently in.
“What are you looking at these for?” Freya asked, turning the laptop towards me slightly. “Gosh, these are old photos. What was I there? Nine?”
“Ten,” I replied. “They’re from the summer before we moved.”
“What a strange set of photos to be looking at. Hey, wait.” She squinted, leaning closer to the screen. “Are these at the Loxford estate? Is that a birthday party?”
“Yep.”
“Hold on.” She zoomed in the photo and pointed at the redheaded girl with a gap in her teeth. “That looks like…”
“Grace,” I finished for her.
Freya jerked to look at me. “Grace?”
“Yep. That’s Grace.”
Confusion flittered across my sister’s features, then slowly morphed into realisation.
“That’s why she looks so familiar,” she said after a moment. “We were friends when we were kids. But when we moved back her parents had already divorced and she wasn’t living at Loxford House anymore. I think you were at university.”
“Is that what happened?”
“Yes, I remember it. We were good friends, and there was one summer a couple of years before that that you, her, Max, and Fred and his sister were inseparable.”
“I don’t remember.”
“You might have been a bit too young to remember it clearly.” She clicked to the next photo. “But I remember that it was like she disappeared off the face of the Earth, and after we moved back to Oxleigh, I was already up here at university,” she recalled. “So I didn’t see her again. Did you not?”
“Not until we walked into each other outside a coffee shop and, apparently, didn’t know who the other was.” I took my laptop back and looked at the photo. It was of a smattering of kids at someone’s birthday party—probably Grace’s, given the location of Loxford House, and I could name everyone there.
All upper-class kids, destined for a peerage of some kind, whether by inheritance or marriage. Failing a peerage, a very comfortable life with someone with money, just like my sister.
It was like a snapshot of privilege.
No wonder Grace wanted nothing to do with it anymore.
“So you’rereallynot actually in a relationship,” Freya surmised.
