And so, God knows how many tequilas later, I was standing on a pool table serenading the hens with “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That),” while Sarah joined me on backing vocals. Or maybe she was just shouting at me to stop, I really can’t recall. All I knew was that, when I woke up the next morning, I was willing to sell my left kidney for a glass of water and an ibuprofen.
Squinting through the blur of notifications on my phone, I was appalled to see it wasn’t even 6 a.m. yet. I immediately rolled over and went back to sleep. When I opened my eyes again two and a half hours later, I didn’t feel any better. I turned my face into the pillow and stared into the blackness, trying desperately to convince my brain it was still nighttime. On the plus side, I did seem to have drunk enough alcohol to blot out approximately 95 percent of the bachelorette party, and Parker’s weird Connector message.
When I remembered Sarah had gone back to Richard’s, my heart sank. There would be no one to bring me toast in bed and pick over the bones of last night with (not that I could remember much of it). When I was a teenager, Dad would bring me a bacon sandwich and a steaming hot mug of sweet tea whenever I’d overdone it the night before. Funny, it was always these little rituals that you missed most when someone you loved left. But I guessed I’d have to get used to being on my own for a while.
As I lay there, headfirst in goose down, wondering if McDonald’s would consider delivering chicken nuggets to me via my bedroom window, my phone flashed.
Sarah: Still alive?
Gwen: Just. I didn’t do anything completely stupid last night, did I?
Sarah: Define stupid.
Gwen: Anything worse than at Flares on my 25th birthday?
Sarah: Well, you didn’t puke in my Marc Jacobs on the way home this time.
Gwen: That saved us a £100 Uber cleaning fee, babes. You should be thanking me. And please stop talking about vomit. I think I’m going to be sick.
Sarah: Eat something. There’s fresh orange juice in the fridge, and I left bagels on the kitchen table.
Gwen: I fricking love you.
Sarah: Now get up and go to work. Here if you need.
Suddenly there was a sharp knocking on the front door. This was always a bad sign—the doorbell had been broken since we moved in, so if anyone was knocking, it meant they’d already been pushing the bell for at least two minutes and, with no success, had moved on to more aggressive methods of getting my attention.
I closed my eyes and tried really hard to close my ears, but each knock had an increasingly persuasive quality to it, and by the twelfth one I was eventually won over.
Pulling on last night’s jeans and my dressing gown, I sloped downstairs. I opened the door expecting a nonplussed Amazon delivery guy to shove a neighbor’s parcel into my reluctant arms. Instead, I found myself face-to-face with two men, one stocky, with a chunky moustache, and a younger guy neatly dressed in a shirt and navy-blue blazer, holding up an ID badge.
Through the haze of my hangover, I could just about make out what it said.
“Police.”