My Maid Of Honour Read The Groom's Texts To Me An Hour Before The Ceremony

She came into the room where I was having my hair done, and she asked everybody to leave, and my mother said, "Now?" and my maid of honour said, "Now."

Then she sat down in front of me, took my hands, and said: "You are going to hate me and I have decided I can live with that."

She showed me his phone.

I am not going to go through the messages. They were what you think they were, they were with someone I knew, and they were from that morning, and one of them was sent while I was writing my vows in the next room.

She had found the phone in the car when she went to get the shoes. It was unlocked. She said, and I believe her, that she was not snooping — a message came up on the screen while she was moving it, and it was enough of a sentence that she then made a decision, deliberately, to read the rest.

She said: "I am sorry. I am so sorry. But you would have found out in a year, and by then there would be a house."

We did not have the wedding.

I want to skip past the next four hours because they are not interesting and because they were the worst of my life. My father spoke to the room. My uncle drove the groom's parents to the station. Somebody — nobody knows who — ate an entire tier of the cake.

Here is what I actually want to say.

Everybody, for months afterwards, told me how lucky I was to have such a good friend.

And they were right. And also: she lost. She lost, in that moment, everything easy about our friendship. For two years, whenever she came into a room, I felt the worst day of my life come in with her. I could not help it. She knew it. She came anyway, every week, for two years.

That is the story. Not the texts. Not the wedding.

Two years of a woman walking into a room, knowing exactly what she was going to make me feel, and doing it anyway, because she had decided she could live with it.

She is my daughter's godmother. She is not "like a sister". She is better than that, because she chose it, and she chose it on the worst possible day.