The Bride Fired Her Maid Of Honour By Group Text Nine Days Before The Wedding

I was one of the bridesmaids, which means I had a front-row seat and no power, which is the worst combination there is.

The maid of honour was Sam. She had organised everything: the hen do, the spreadsheet, the transport, the hotel block, the emergency kit with plasters and safety pins and a small bottle of gin.

Nine days out, the bride sent a message to the bridesmaid group chat which said, in full:

"Sam, I've thought about this a lot and I need to make a change. Your energy is off and I need to be surrounded by joy. You're still welcome as a guest. Xx"

Sam replied with a single question mark.

Nobody else replied at all, and I have to live with that, and I am not proud of it.

Forty minutes later the bride sent a screenshot to the WRONG chat. She meant it for her cousin. It landed in ours.

It was a message from her fiancé's mother, and it said: "Sam looks better than you in the photos. Just being honest, darling. You don't want that on the wall for thirty years."

And under it, the bride had written: "I know. Sorting it."

Sam read it. We all read it. There were eleven seconds where nothing happened and then Sam left the chat.

The wedding went ahead. Sam did not come. I did, because I had the dress and no spine.

The mother-in-law was radiant.

Here is the ending, which I did not expect when I started writing this.

Two years later the bride rang Sam and apologised — really apologised, an hour-long, ugly, correct apology — and told her that the marriage was over and that the first thing her husband had said, in the last row, was, "You were never even that nice to your friends."

They are friends again. Cautiously. Slowly.

The mother-in-law sent Sam a Christmas card that year. Sam did not open it. Sam put it, unopened, in the emergency kit, with the plasters and the safety pins and the gin, and she keeps it there, and she has never explained why, and I have never asked.