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Chapter 1
One month earlier…

‘No offence Eve, but I don’t like your ideas for the hen party.’

Any sentence that starts off with the words, ‘No offence’ could surely only ever result in the other person being immediately and instinctively offended, Eve thought. And how on earth did Tanya know what her plans even were as they were meant to be top secret? Every subject line of every email Eve had sent about the hen do had said so. In capitals. As if she had read Eve’s mind, Tanya followed up with, ‘Maggie forwarded me the emails.’

Maggie. Eve should have known. One of Tanya’s work colleagues, who Eve had not yet had the pleasure of meeting, had Replied All to every message, finding fault with each element.

‘I mean, a roller disco? What were you thinking Eve?’

‘We used to love the roller disco!’

‘When we were at university! I do not want to turn up to my wedding in a plaster cast!’

‘So I guess that you don’t want to go zorbing either?’

‘No, Eve, I do not. Honestly, I thought that you of all people would be able to come up with something original, fun, and safe for us all to do. It’s meant to be in three weeks’ time!’

‘What do you mean, me of all people?’

‘You work for a wedding magazine, Eve! If anyone should be able to pull a fantastic hen do out of a hat, it should be you.’

‘To be fair Tanya, it’s taken flippin’ ages to get everyone to confirm if they can come or not, then everyone had a different idea about what it was they wanted to do – you’d already vetoed any kind of cocktail-making, naked male bodies and making things.’

‘How many cocktail-making hen parties have you been to?’ Eve didn’t say so out loud, but Tanya had a point. ‘And I’m going to be looking at Luke’s naked body for the rest of my life, I don’t particularly want to see another one on my hen do.’

‘Which is why I made the plan I did, there’s not a cocktail or a penis in sight.’

Eve’s colleague, Kat, the magazine’s beauty director who sat at the adjacent desk to Eve’s, raised a pencilled-on eyebrow at hearing Eve’s last sentence.

Tanya wouldn’t let up. ‘So out of everything else in the world we could do, you chose roller disco and zorbing?’

‘And a meal out; believe me, finding a restaurant that would cater for a vegan, a coeliac, a lactose-intolerance, a shellfish allergy and two nut allergies, was pretty bloody difficult. You have very tricky friends.’

‘Yes, Maggie told me that you’ve booked a Lebanese place. I hate Middle Eastern food.’

‘Hate’s a pretty strong word Tanya, how can you hate an entire continent’s cuisine? I’m sure there’ll be something you’ll like.’

‘I doubt it.’

‘That’s the spirit,’ Eve said, cradling the phone under her chin while she scrolled through the local dog shelter’s website for photogenic mutts for a feature she was writing on Instagram engagements. She had a lovely image in her mind of two cute dogs holding up a sign saying, ‘our humans are getting married’.

‘Are you being sarcastic?’ Tanya barked. ‘This is the only hen do I’m ever going to have, Eve, and I want it to be perfect. I want a country club, a few beauty treatments, lots of champagne and sushi.’

‘You said you wanted it to be a surprise.’

‘Well, I don’t. That’s what I want.’

‘You could have saved me about thirty hours of planning and phoning round if that’s what you had just said in the beginning you know?’

‘You’re one of my best friends, you’re meant to know what I’d like.’

Labelling the two of them ‘best friends’ was a bit of a stretch. Eve was starting to realise that being contacted by Tanya out of the blue to be asked to be her bridesmaid, a decade after they were at university together, had little to do with nostalgia or fuzzy feelings of friendship and more to do with Tanya wanting to take advantage of Eve’s little black book of wedding contacts.

Eve absentmindedly pulled another paperclip out of her stationery pot and added it to a long line of clips that was now stretching across her desk. ‘Fine. Leave it with me.’

‘Oh, and one more thing, do you have your ears pierced?’

That was an odd question. ‘No, why?’

‘Could you get them done before the wedding? I’ve bought all the bridesmaids the same earrings to wear on the day as your gift from me.’

This took the biscuit. ‘Um, not really Tanya, I’ve never liked the idea of it.’

Eve could sense Tanya’s lips pursing over the phone line, possibly accompanied by a hint of an eye twitch too. ‘Maybe you could think about it, Eve.’

‘I have thought about it Tanya, and I don’t want to do it. I’ve got long hair anyway, so you wouldn’t even see them.’

‘Well, I want you to wear it up, nothing fancy like mine’s going to be, just a simple ponytail.’

Eve wanted to say more, to inject her friend with a hearty dose of realism and perspective right into her toned behind, but instead took a deep breath. ‘A ponytail is not a problem, the ear piercing is. But I promise you it’s not going to ruin your day.’ Eve hung up the call and slammed it down on her desk.

Kat looked up from a row of carefully-ordered pink lipsticks that were standing sentry on her own desk for a feature called Kiss-proof lipsticks that will stay on your lips not your groom. ‘Which one of your bridezillas was that?’

‘Tanya. Taking bridezilla-dom to another level entirely. I now have to find a country hotel that can fit twelve women in for beauty treatments in three weeks’ time. And a Japanese restaurant that doesn’t use shellfish and delivers to the arse end of nowhere. Oh, and she wants me to mutilate my body in order to accept my present which has quite clearly come from the heart.’

Sighing, Eve turned back to her computer screen. Her Dear Eve inbox was heaving under the strain of the many unread emails that had come in over the weekend. As well as writing three or four features for Your Wonderful Wedding per month, Eve was also the magazine’s resident agony aunt. But as wedding magazines were beautiful and aspirational, and not angst-ridden drama sagas like her last magazine, What a Life!, most of the questions were about how to stop the groom’s buttonhole from drooping, rather than anything more gritty. It made a nice change to be writing about the highest point in someone’s life rather than their lowest. Writing features with headlines like Blooming lovely, or Love at first blush certainly beat ones like My nephew is also my uncle or Why our 50-year age gap doesn’t matter.

Hi Eve!

I’m torn between wanting a French manicure for my day or a dusky pink to match the roses in my bouquet and the bridesmaid dresses. My mum thinks that a pink will be better, but I’m worried it might chip and look more obvious? At least if a French manicure chips, you can’t really see it. What should I do?

Thanks,

Helen, Staffordshire.

Eve was only meant to select the best five emails for the monthly Q&A page and to ignore the rest. Print-worthy, this one was not, but as she could sense the desperation in Helen from Staffordshire’s email, Eve replied nonetheless.

Hi Helen,

Firstly, congratulations on your big day, and well done for choosing such an on-trend colour for your wedding, dusky pink is a timeless choice. The best solution would be to wear the pink varnish and ask one of your bridesmaids to carry a spare bottle of the matching colour in their clutch bag to solve any chipping disasters.

Enjoy your day!

Eve xx

It wasn’t strictly what she was paid to do, and Eve knew that her editor, Fiona, wouldn’t approve of her taking time out of her working day to personally reply, but it had taken all of fifteen seconds to stop Helen from Staffordshire losing any more sleep.

Eve’s phone buzzed again. It was another university friend, Ayesha, who was getting married a month after Tanya. ‘Babe, where can I buy lawn flamingoes?’

Eve looked heavenward. ‘Lawn what?’

‘Flamingoes.’

‘That’s what I thought you said. What are lawn flamingoes?’

‘You know, big sculptures of flamingoes that stand on your lawn. I thought it would be really nice to have one for everyone coming to the wedding and you have to find the one with your name on it and it’s got your table number on it too.’

Eve had to take a deliberately slow breath in before replying in case an expletive slipped out. ‘Um, Ayesha. I thought the theme for your wedding was The Wizard of Oz? At what point in the film were there flamingoes?’

Ayesha laughed. ‘Oh, there weren’t silly, I just really really love flamingoes, and I thought that getting lots of dwarves to stand on the lawn dressed like Munchkins might be in really poor taste. Unless you don’t think so?’

Not for the first time, Eve questioned her choice in friends.

‘You’re too nice.’ Kat remarked as soon as Eve had put down the phone. ‘If I said yes every time one of my friends asked me to help them with their weddings, I’d never have time for anything else.’

‘Welcome to my world,’ Eve muttered.

‘How many weddings do you have again this summer?’

‘Five.’ Eve pointed to the noticeboard that hung on the wall above her desk, which was crammed with save the dates, invitations and gift list registry cards. A couple, like Tanya’s, were classically white with embossed words while others, like Ayesha’s, were colourful and contemporary. Regardless of their style or size of swirly writing, all Eve could see when she glanced at them was the potential of stress and financial ruin.

‘Five? That’s insane.’

‘But it’s not just the weddings is it? It’s all the hen dos and rehearsals, I literally have one free weekend between now and the end of August.’

‘Eve, they’re not your weddings though, you are allowed to have fun outside of being chief wedding planner you know. Look at you, you’re gorgeous, in a very English sort of way, with your long red hair and alabaster skin—’

‘You can tell you’re a beauty journalist,’ Eve interrupted. ‘I’m pale and freckly.’

‘And interesting. You’re young, and you’re wasting the summer by being at the beck and call of people who have already found their other halves.’

‘Cheers.’

‘I’m serious!’ Kat said, emphasising how serious she was by waving a lipstick in Eve’s face. ‘How long have we worked together now?’

‘Two years.’

‘Two years. And in those two years, how many boyfriends have you had? You’re never going to find someone if you don’t put yourself out there.’

What was the opposite of rose-tinted, Eve wondered, because it was exactly the same any time a friend of hers became coupled-up; they looked back on their solo days with hand-on-heart relief that they had dragged themselves out of the cesspool of single life.

‘See, that’s the difference Kat, it barely crosses my mind to look for a boyfriend, let alone “put myself out there!”’ Eve shuddered. ‘When the time is right, he’ll just turn up.’

‘Eve, Eve, Eve,’ Kat shook her head the way you would to a child that’s put their left shoe on their right foot for the fortieth time. ‘Finding a partner requires a massive amount of effort, he doesn’t just “turn up”. Have you learnt nothing from writing about weddings?’

Kat had a point. It always amazed Eve how much effort some of the brides, and some grooms too, had put into finding someone to marry. If she’d had the job of interviewing couples twenty or thirty years ago about how they met, the stories would have invariably included the words ‘school’, ‘pub’, or ‘nightclub’, but nowadays the hoops that brides jumped through to get to the altar were staggering.

‘I like being single,’ Eve said. ‘Anyway, I am far too busy.’

‘It’s just that in the two years I’ve known you, you’ve never had anyone special in your life, and you’re pretty cool so I just wonder why, that’s all.’ Kat started putting the lipsticks away in their boxes. ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’

‘There’s no big mystery, Kat. I really liked someone once, and I’m just waiting to meet another person that I like as much, that’s all.’

‘So, what happened to him?’

Eve used the time it took to sweep all her paperclips into her hand and pour them back into their pot to think of an answer that was completely devoid of sentiment. There was no point getting upset about it after all this time. She settled on, ‘I honestly have no idea.’ Which, as it happened, was completely true.