‘A broken heart at a wedding is like an ugly baby: everyone will put up with it but keep it out of their face.’

‘A broken heart at a wedding is like ice cream for dinner, incredibly indulgent.’

‘A broken heart at a wedding is like your nine-to-five job, a fact of life not worth whining about.’

Nora leaned back in her train seat. The scenery had not changed much since she had left the city. She was four hours in with five hours to go.

She looked down at her diary, seeing that the fifteen lines or so beginning, ‘A broken heart at a wedding is like . . .’ seemed rather pathetic once she put the pen down.

She glanced at her watch: like her handwritten diary, it seemed a relic. She assumed her friends kept their diaries in their Google drives, accessible from any device. That is if they kept diaries; she didn’t even know if they did. Nora thought it was important to be aware of how much she had forgotten, which she was reminded whenever she read a diary from her teen years and marvelled at the names. She would revisit what at the time of writing had seemed like a life-changing event, but when she tried to conjure an image of it would come up with zilch.

The intricate brass minute-hand on Nora’s watch ticked over to midday, a vertical exclamation point on top of its shorter, fatter counterpart. She almost leaped up from her chair in glee. It was a respectable time.

She walked to the dining cart where two young men, probably backpackers, were leaning against the counter watching some kind of sports game on a small screen held closely between them.

Nora smoothed her already crisp jeans. She was wearing a navy soft cotton down T-shirt, but her linen blazer remained draped over her seat in case it got cold later. Her chestnut-coloured hair had been blow-dried two days before so it was that sort of no-effort-ruffled-chic that she so enjoyed.

She watched the two men – adult-sized boys actually, she thought to herself – for another thirty seconds and cleared her throat. They looked up simultaneously, and seeing who was in front of them each tried to serve her at the same time.

‘What would you like?’

‘How are you today?’

‘What can I get you?’

Nora caught the eye of the shorter one, just to save her the hassle of craning her neck slightly more, and smiled without showing any teeth.

‘I’ll just have a chardonnay, thanks.’

The shorter one beamed. ‘Certainly, ma’am.’ He turned around and, as he retrieved a miniature bottle from the fridge, Nora felt a wave of relief to see it was 500 millilitres and not one of the tinier ones. He gave her the bottle with a defeated-looking plastic cup on top as she handed over her credit card.

He winked at her. ‘See you again soon, no doubt.’

Nora took the bottle and cup and let the comment bother her all the way back to her seat. What did he mean by that? That because she was buying wine at midday she would certainly be back again before the train reached its destination? She could have a glass of wine on the train. It was one of the reasons she had decided on the train: it seemed old-fashioned, kind of exciting. Time for a sit and a long think. A sit, a long think and a drink. They wouldn’t offer it on the train if it was a problem, would they?

Nora was having this conversation with herself more and more lately. Did she need to drink wine at every dinner she went to? Could she have a lunch with someone without a bottle of something? Was two nights in a row booze-free enough? Did she need to drink at the cinema? At the China Town food court? At baby showers?

But everywhere she looked at these places, at these events, people were drinking as well. When she googled it a multitude of blogs came up, people who drank socially, were never told they had a problem and they gave up alcohol and then wrote about how it was a problem, an easily disguised problem if you’re not drinking at six a.m. and still holding down your full-time job. The bar for being labelled not-a-problem-drinker is in fact very low.

All the blogs said that people who drank ‘normally’ never thought about drinking. They didn’t count their alcohol-free nights and they didn’t ask anyone else if they thought they drank normally. But Nora wasn’t so sure. She also monitored how much meat she ate, how much sugar she consumed.

As long as she could remember, as a child at the lonely dinner table with just her mother, she ate her dinner faster than anyone she knew and then stared longingly at their full plate, just like she did in adulthood with her glass of wine.

She twisted the cap on her Jacob’s Creek chardonnay and poured it into her little glass. She took the first wonderful sip and exhaled. Now was not the time to be thinking about her drinking. Now was the time to enjoy the surge of energy and hopefulness of the first sip, the low and euphoric hum that surged through her veins as she began to shake off all that kept her up at three a.m. She would focus only on the next blissful few hours. Now that she had a little armour, it was time to get out her laptop. Balancing the cup on her knee she slid it out of its simple black case and opened it up on the tray table in front of her. Taking a moment to whir to life, she dutifully typed in her password. MrsTran. It had long been a private joke with herself, a play on other girls’ obsessions with what they thought marriage meant and other things she felt intellectually above, as well as a joke about her obsession with her boyfriend. Hamming it up, even when there was no one there to ‘get’ it.

She hesitated, took a swig of her wine, and opened her email. She clicked on the last email from Tom Tran. It had already been opened but remained without a response. She drained the rest of her glass, glanced sideways at the woman in her fifties beside her who had boarded at one of the larger and affluent coastal towns and was now eyeing her, poured the rest of the bottle into the glass and began to read:

The fact is, in my heart, I know that I have generally taken you for a figurative ride for four years with little to no intention of marriage or children with you, which has forced me to take a hard look at myself. And I don’t like what I see. Especially for you. I think the fact of the matter is you wanted this so badly you looked past the fact I am a pretty small person at the heart of it. And I know it’s a cliché, but I am so sorry and I know that there is someone out there who does deserve you a lot more than I do, especially when I look at what I have done and the fact I pushed these things to the side to be “a good guy”. I appreciate now, ironically, that blinding yourself to the fact you love someone, but not enough to give as much of yourself to them that they are giving to you, means that you are NOT A NICE GUY, but an emotionally retarded fuckwit (to paraphrase from Helen Fielding, I guess).

Another thing I don’t like about the email exchange is how absolutely cold and impassive this all sounds, when this whole mess has been dragging me into a deep, dark funk for the last ten days. I don’t want you to think this isn’t devastating for me (leaving aside the whole “poor-me I can’t emote, boo-fucking-hoo” confessional at the top there). In the time we’ve been together, we’ve done so much, and you have been at my side for so many important things in my life (career change, the six-month healing process of a broken leg, family estrangements, etc.). I can’t repay you for that. I wish I could.

And I guess that’s the point. I believe this whole situation has seen us become different people. You are growing into your role as one of the country’s leading young lawyers. You are also growing into yourself as a young woman, and not the, ah, brash but brilliant teen I first met. And sometimes, like it or not, I feel I am in the way of this because I cannot give you what you want as you grow (and I try desperately to stay in place). Once again, it is not fair to you. And I feel like a terrible person because I have been with you for four years, giving hope to you that something would happen along these avenues when it wasn’t in me to start with, and is definitely drifting further away now.’

Nora shuddered and let out a low groan. She put down the glass and gently pressed the edge of her palms against her forehead. Reading it physically hurt. She could genuinely feel her heart contract tightly in her chest. She still couldn’t quite believe it each time she read it. And she read it much more than she should. She hadn’t even told Claudia she had broken it off with Tom. She had done it half as a lark. To try on singledom like slightly different underwear before returning to faithful briefs. Tom was still the man she was supposed to have her babies with, an actual life with. It would have been one last hurrah before settling down. If she was being brutally honest with herself it was also to sleep with one of her colleagues without feeling any guilt. And somehow it had spiralled out into this. An email telling her he had never really loved her. He did say he was devastated and blah blah blah. But that was the essentials of the message. He’d never loved her.

And now she was on her way to her best friend’s wedding, unable to talk to the person she was closest to in the world about the break-up because it was happening in the most turbulent week of Claudia’s life. Nora assumed it was the most chaotic; she hadn’t spoken to Claudia since she had arrived in her home town. But Nora had been friends with her long enough to know what to expect. She was half prepared for an emotional wretch to meet her at the train station. It couldn’t be a meeting of two emotional wretches, so Nora really needed to pull herself together.

Just one more read of the email, she told herself.

But first, she thought, standing up, another drink.