The Things I Couldn’t Say….

It was everything the perfect wedding was supposed to be. My mother struggled to stifle her joyous sobs that were interspersed with ’Oh you’re so beautiful’s’. My long ivory gown clung in the right places and wasn’t all puffy like a meringue. I was marrying the man who was giving up his military life for me after one final tour, and all my family and friends had come to wish us well.

Except, that wasn’t the truth. Nor was it the perfect wedding.

My maid of honour wasn’t the person she was meant to be. My cousin Louisa was lovely, sure. But she wasn’t Maura. Louisa hovered around me nervously, like a bird. It seemed that at any second, she could bolt from the room never to be seen again. In truth, she was making me nervous.

Since I’d told Maura of my engagement to Casey, she’d been weird. I could almost feel her withdrawing from me and as the date grew closer, she became little more than a memory in my life: a ghost that haunted the edges of consciousness and taunted me.

Three months before the date, I received a letter from the bridal shop that confirmed the payment of my dress. I flicked through the receipt and the name signed on the bottom caused tears to well in my eyes. Her delicate writing danced over the page and I instantly missed her. Maura was my friend, my best friend, hell, my only real friend.

It wasn’t that she’d stopped talking to me as such, just that we weren’t ’us’ any more. There were no late nights with a couple of bottles of wine, Netflix and a giant bowl full of popcorn. No private jokes and playful banter in the morgue. It was as if she’d shut down and no matter what I tried, she wouldn’t, or couldn’t tell me why and the more the wedding plans grew, the less time I had to try and coax the truth from her.

That receipt was the last contact we had. I’d called her on the morning of my wedding and her cell had gone straight to voicemail, as had her home phone and the office phones, even the crime lab didn’t answer.