When I introduce my dad as Stephen Ashworth, he says, ‘Big Steve to friends,’ and goes straight in for a hug, rather than a handshake. In that moment, I don’t think I’ve ever loved my dad more. No airs, no graces, just Big Steve being Big Steve. Elena and Rupert look less than impressed, though, pulling away from his hug the minute it’s polite. I could punch them for the looks of disdain on their faces and that is completely not in my character. Nicole outright sniggers at my dad and although her friend tries to cover it up with a cough, everyone hears, including Dad, whose lovely big smile drops momentarily. I could happily punch her in the face too, which I feel would be in anyone’s character. How dare she make my dad feel like that?
‘Where is Lizzie? You must meet Lizzie!’ Daniel says quickly, sensing the awkwardness. ‘You’ll love her.’
‘I’m sure we will.’ Nicole says quietly. To his credit, Rupert shoots her a look, but Elena smiles indulgently at Nicole’s bad behaviour.
I don’t know where Lizzie is. She must have wandered off when the Balfours arrived so while we wait for her to come back, I extract Dad from the group in order to ‘introduce him to my friend Lauren’. He’s met Lauren a gazillion times but the Balfours are snakes and I don’t want them around my big old bear of a dad for longer than they need to be. The Balfours are best managed in small doses.
I take Dad over to Lauren, who’s chatting happily to some of my workmates, and they immediately fall into some easy banter. I feel my phone buzz in my clutch and pull it out. It’s from Daniel. I look up in surprise and catch his eye from across the room. He nods at the phone in my hand. I read his message.
That could have been worse! x
He’s right, I suppose. It was a bit awkward and Nicole and Elena were rude, but then that wasn’t really a surprise. I expected that from them and I managed to get Dad away relatively unscathed. I’m sure that once everyone’s had some champagne it will be fine. Everybody will relax and it will be fine. How many times already tonight have I said ‘fine’, I wonder?
Chapter Nine
Lizzie
There’s this thing I do when I’m a bit stressed about something. I try and push whatever it is to the back of my mind. And how do I do that? I party. I dance and I drink and I chat and I flirt and I distract myself from the fact that things are a bit shit. I’ve always done it. I know it’s not healthy but when I need to forget about something, that’s the only way I can. And it’s worked for me so far.
The party is really busy now. People are milling about, dancing, drinking and feeling happy for Becky and Daniel. Jay is here somewhere, too, but I don’t know where. He spotted a bartender he’d once knobbed on the London to Edinburgh fast train and wanted to go say hello and I haven’t seen him since.
I’ve still not really had the chance to see Becky since Dad first arrived, and I haven’t met Daniel’s family yet either. Every time I spot either of them, they’re chatting away to some guest and after what Becky said about me behaving, I figured it would be best for me to stay out of the way anyway. I can just stand in this corner and take occasional photos of the party and capture the action for Becky and Daniel.
I finish my latest glass of champagne and head to the loo again. That’s the trouble with mainlining champers – I need to wee all the time.
In the toilet, I’m just finishing up my business when I hear a couple of people come in, speaking in voices so scratchy and posh that I’m in no doubt that they’re from the Daniel contingent. Maybe it’s Daniel’s family. I should go out there and introduce myself like the good sister that I am, I think determinedly.
And then one voice says, ‘Did you see the picture in The Times?’
I smile to myself. They must be talking about the engagement announcement that was in The Times a few days ago. It was a lovely write-up and had been accompanied by a gorgeous picture of Daniel and Becky that I’d taken the year we all went to Barcelona together. They look tanned and giddy and in love. A far better choice than the usual staid photos other couples use. This one was much more them, it suited them as a couple.
‘God, I know!’ came another voice. ‘Such a mess. Who sends a cheap holiday picture to The Times? Tacky.’
‘Right? Hello? If there’s ever a time for a professional photographer, Seffy, this is it.’
‘Totally, darling. Have you seen what she’s wearing tonight?’
‘Who is it even by? No designer I’ve ever heard of, that’s for sure. And it’s definitely not this season.’
‘Clearly high street. Rule number one for your engagement party – make a fucking effort with your clothes. It’s basic, babe. Tragic, really.’
‘Ugh. I know. And the father! Big Steve? Mortifying.’
What the hell? My heart starts pounding with fury. Before I know what I’m doing, I wrench open the door of the toilet cubicle.
‘Who the fuck are you bellends?’ I shout, shaking in anger. I’m staring at two women who are looking at me in shock. One of them looks like a skinnier, less sexy version of Angelina Jolie. The other one looks like a pointier and spikier female version of . . . well, oh shit, Daniel.
So this is Nicole. Becky wasn’t kidding – she is awful. How dare she slag my sister off at her engagement party? Who does she think she is?
‘Excuse me?’ Nicole spits, pulling out a dark red Dior lipstick and gliding it across her already lipsticked lips. ‘This is a private conversation.’ She looks me up and down. ‘What’s the name of the manager here? I’ll have you fired!’
‘You just can’t get the staff,’ her little sidekick says nastily.
What a pair of helmets.
I step closer to them. ‘I’m Lizzie Ashworth. As in Rebecca Ashworth’s sister.’
Nicole’s face drops for a millisecond before returning to its original sneer. The other one has the good grace to let her pale white cheeks blush in embarrassment.
‘We were just joking around.’ Nicole says smoothly, with a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. ‘We love Rebecca!’
Do these two self-entitled twits think I was born yesterday? ‘You liar.’ I hiss, my voice thick with booze and fury. ‘You’re a total knob, a liar and that lipstick is faaaaaaarrrr too dark for your pasty complexion.’
I put my hands on my hips and taken another step towards them. Both Nicole and Seffy’s eyes widen.
‘Now, I don’t want to ruin my sister and Daniel’s night by telling them what a poisonous little toad you are but I swear to God if I hear you say one more negative word about my family again you’ll be wearing that champagne and I’ll throw you out of here myself.’
I’m aware I sound like a dick. And that I’m drunk. But I’m so mad I’m not even really thinking straight. I hate these two twig bitches.
It seems to do the trick, though, because Seffy nods quickly and drags Nicole towards the door. I follow them out, satisfied that they’ve been well and truly warned off. As they open the door leading back into the party room, Nicole trips on something and goes flying into the room, ending up sprawled on the floor in the middle of all the guests.
HAHA! Serves her right, the witch.
Everyone rushes over, and the music seems to stop on cue.
‘Nicole! My God, are you okay?’ someone who I think must be Rupert Balfour says.
Nicole sits up and leans over, clutching her ankle in pain.
Daniel and Becky hurry over quickly. ‘Are you okay? Can you walk? What happened?’
And then, from her spot on the floor, with genuine tears in her eyes, Nicole points up at where I am standing. ‘She . . . she pushed me!’ she cries, her voice choking with upset.
What the hell?
Everyone turns to look at me, horrified. I’m so shocked and confused by what’s happening that a nervous giggle escapes my lips. But to everyone else it looks like I’m just laughing at the poor girl on the floor who’s hurt her ankle. Not ideal.
‘Lizzie?’ Becky asks, frowning.
‘I didn’t! I didn’t!’ I say quickly. ‘Of
course I didn’t push her!’
There’s silence. ‘Maybe you’re mistaken, Nicole,’ Becky says.
‘My Lizzie would never do that,’ my dad adds, his cheeks red with anger.
‘I felt her push me. She threatened me and then she shoved me.’
Becky’s eyes widen. I have a familiar and unpleasant feeling in my stomach that this might just be some of the ‘Lizzie nonsense’ she warned me not to do. Bollocks.
‘I swear to God; I didn’t push her. She’s lying! Well, not so much about the threatening part, but I definitely did not push her!’ Small victory there.
Even to me, my voice sounds drunk. I don’t mean it to, but the champagne has done its job and I guess I am a little drunk. Maybe a lot drunk. Ahhhh, who am I kidding – I’m smashed.
‘Seffy saw it! She was a witness,’ Nicole says suddenly, still on the floor, looking all tiny and feeble like a broken doll.
I wait for Seffy to say that of course she didn’t see it because IT DIDN’T HAPPEN.
She pauses for a moment, her cheeks turning pink. I think she’s about to verify my innocence when she takes a deep breath and says quietly, ‘It’s true. I saw her push Nicole out of the door.’
Wait, what?? NO! I am drunk but not ‘forget I pushed someone to their doom’ drunk.
‘What the hell?’ I yell. ‘What the fucking fuck are you talking about!’ I walk towards Becky, stumbling slightly as I do.
Where’s Jay? He’ll vouch for me. I glance around but I can’t see him anywhere.
‘Bex, listen to me, they were slagging you off. So I told her to shut her mouth,’ I tell her fervently (and yes I’m aware I’m paraphrasing for my own benefit). ‘You know I didn’t push her, right?’
‘Seffy saw you do it! Why on earth would I lie about such a thing?’ Nicole says, adding a pained sob onto the end for effect.
Becky looks down at Nicole doubtfully. ‘Maybe you didn’t realise you did it. Maybe you stumbled. You have drunk quite a lot . . . ’
I blink. She doesn’t believe me?
I look up at my dad. ‘Maybe you should have a coffee,’ he says kindly. ‘And I’ll take you home.’
‘This is an outrage!’ another woman I don’t know declares. ‘This is . . . assault! Common assault. Look at my daughter! She’s hurt! We should call the police.’
Right, that’ll be the Mother Balfour, then. She seems like just as much of a delight as her devil daughter.
‘No need for that.’ Daniel says quickly. But he doesn’t disagree that it was assault, that I pushed someone.
I can’t believe they’re not defending me. That they don’t believe me. All I was doing was trying to stand up for them. And what? Just because I had a few drinks I’m automatically the female Conor McGregor?
I feel the tears rush to my eyes. And before I start crying in front of everyone and make even more of a fool of myself, I run out of the pub and into the night.
Chapter Ten
Becky
I wake up the morning after the engagement party with a feeling of dread in my stomach. What started out as such a gorgeous night turned sour very quickly. I don’t believe Lizzie did it; Nicole is just the type to make something like that up. But then she said that Lizzie threatened to ‘make her wear her champagne’, and I had to admit that had Lizzie written all over it. And Lizzie was pretty drunk, even after I asked her not to be. And I wavered, just for a moment, but I did waver. So Lizzie stormed out, absolutely distraught. I tried phoning her, but she hasn’t returned any of my calls and now I feel awful. I let her down. The party went downhill after that. Daniel went with Seffy and Nicole to the hospital to get her ankle checked out and after that it was all a bit flat, so I just came home and went to bed.
I sit up in the bed. Daniel’s not there. He got in late last night – said they were waiting ages at the hospital. Nicole was fine. Not a mark on her ankle. They expect she just ‘twisted’ it.
I get out of bed with a sigh and pad into the kitchen where Daniel is sitting at the table, peering at his laptop with a frown on his face.
Is he working on a Sunday again? This past year his dad has really been running him ragged. I don’t think Daniel would mind if he loved the work but his heart isn’t really in it. The reason he puts up with it is because of the deal he made with his dad when Daniel was seventeen. As the eldest son and heir to the Balfour empire, he was expected to take over the family business, but Daniel’s heart always yearned for something else and the only thing he’s wanted to do is become a vet. He knew it could never happen for him, but he also knew he needed to get away from the pressures of his family, away from the weight of expectation and feeling of being trapped by a future he didn’t want. And so he made a deal with his dad: he’d take over the family businesses when the time came without question, as long as Daniel chose where he went to university. That’s how he ended up in Leeds, rather than Oxford or Cambridge where all Balfour men are expected to go. He admitted to me once that he chose Leeds so he could get as far away from his family as possible and enjoy what he saw as his final three years of freedom. He abandoned his plans to become a vet so he could live life his way for a short while. He hadn’t expected to meet the love of his life in Leeds so I was a bit of a spanner in the works as far as his family was concerned. Oooopsie. I look at him now and know that I’ll love this kind and beautiful man always. Daniel and I are for keeps and now that we’re engaged, his family will just have to learn to accept that I’m not going anywhere.
I join him at the table and pour myself a coffee from the cafetière.
‘It’s Sunday,’ I scold lightly. ‘You shouldn’t be working, you know. Relax!’
Daniel looks up, snapped out of his daze. ‘I wasn’t working.’ He grimaces and spins the laptop around to face me so that I can see the screen.
It’s the Daily World website. Why is he showing me this? I narrow my eyes and lean in closer, gasping when I realise that the picture on the screen is of Nicole sprawled elegantly on the floor of The Elgin. Beside it is a picture of Daniel and me – one taken at some fancy charity event the Balfours sponsored last year. And underneath that is a picture of Lizzie. My Lizzie Wizzie. It’s been lifted off Facebook. It’s a picture of her at a ‘ghetto’ themed fancy dress party she went to a couple of years ago. She’s wearing a Burberry baseball cap and sticking two fingers up at the camera. They neglect to mention that it’s fancy dress.
What is this? Why are we in the Daily World?
I glance at the headline:
BRAWL AT BALFOUR ENGAGEMENT PARTY
‘Oh, God,’ I whisper, scrolling down to read the rest of this nonsense.
Daniel and Nicole are part of London society so they’ve always attracted some press attention. Daniel always does his best to avoid it as much as possible, but Nicole loves it and courts it unashamedly. She often makes sure the paps knows just where she’s having brunch, which new restaurant she’ll be at and the clubs she plans on going to. But I’ve never really been of interest to them before. But then I guess I wasn’t marrying into one of the UK’s wealthiest families before.
And now there’s a huge article all about Lizzie, the ‘black sheep’ of our family, and about her ‘lashing out’ at our ‘low key, intimate’ engagement party. I can’t believe it. They’re talking about her like she’s some kind of aggressive lunatic. How did the press even know where our engagement party was, let alone what happened there? Who took that picture of Nicole? I read more.
In a tale that mirrors that of Kate and Wills, Rebecca and Daniel fell in love while at university. Him, the heir to a multi-million-pound fortune and her a book editor from a northern working-class town.
A source close to the couple said ‘Daniel and Rebecca are a wonderful couple. But every family has their issues and the Ashworths are no different. Lizzie has always been nothing but trouble. Now she’s jealous that Rebecca has landed her prince. She’s acting out to get attention. Even if that means resorting to violence. It’s deeply embarrass
ing for both families.’
‘What the hell?’ I yell, slamming my fist down on the table angrily. ‘These are total lies! Who is this “source”? Can we get them to remove it? They can’t say this about Lizzie. None of it is true!’
Daniel puts his head into his hands. ‘I’m so sorry. I’ve already emailed my pal at the DW but they can’t take it down. It’s their policy not to and the article has already been shared hundreds of times and they say it’s came from a reliable source – someone who was actually at the party.’
‘Oh, my God.’ I swallow heavily. I scroll down past the article and see that there are already 295 comments.
They are soooooo gorgeous together. Relationship goals.
That Lizzie looks like a right chav. How embarrassing. Trash will always be trash.
Rebecca Ashworth is sooo pretty. Love that dress. Anyone know where it’s from?
‘Shit,’ I whisper, my eyes filling with tears. I can’t even take in the nice things that are being said about me – all I can think about is my poor Lizzie.
Daniel gets off the chair and comes around the table to hug me. ‘This is what they do. I didn’t think they’d be interested in us. I don’t understand.’
‘My little Lizzie. This will kill her.’ My heart aches for my little sister. She must already be in pieces after last night and now this. And I’ve been such a twat about her getting fired. What a mess. I shake my head and pick up my phone to call her.
It rings three times and then goes onto voicemail. I click the call off and send a WhatsApp instead.
Ring me ASAP. I’m so sorry about the newspaper. What a bunch of dicks and they don’t deserve your time. I’ve got you, little sis. No matter what. I got you.
My Sister's Wedding: For better or worse, two families are about to become one . . . Page 6
