The Groom Butt-Dialled Me During The Vows And I Heard All Of It

I could not go. Money, work, a visa problem I will not bore you with. I had cried about it, privately, twice.

At 14:06 my phone rang and it was him, and I answered, and there was a rustle and then a room, and then his voice, close, saying: "...sorry, yeah, sorry, I've got it—"

He had put his phone in his pocket. He had, at some point, sat on his own contacts.

I said "Ollie?" about nine times, like an idiot, into a phone, in a supermarket, in the frozen aisle.

Then somebody said, "We are gathered here today."

And I stopped talking.

I stood in the frozen aisle of a supermarket four hundred miles away and I listened to my best friend of twenty-two years get married. I heard her laugh at the bit where he stumbled on her middle name, which he has never been able to say. I heard his voice go — and it did go, it broke, twice, and he told me later that it did not, and he is a liar.