The recording app was still running. Eleven minutes and forty seconds.
I had started it before I hid, because I thought I might want to keep his reaction to my stupid prank and play it at an anniversary.
It had got every single word instead.
When I finally crawled out, my dress was grey with dust down one side and the veil had a tear in it.
I stood in front of that mirror and wiped my face and something in me went very calm and has largely stayed that way since.
My name is Maris and I am thirty-one and until about eleven twenty that night I would have told you I was the luckiest woman at that wedding.
The thing I have not been able to explain to anybody is the four seconds before the lighter.
Because for those four seconds I was still planning to come out.
I was going to wait for her to leave and then get back under and do it properly when he came up. I had it worked out.
It is the smoke that stopped me. Not the words — the smoke, because it meant she was settling in, and because it meant he had lied about something small and pointless for no reason at all.
A man who lies about his mother’s cigarettes is a man who lies as a default setting.
I have thought about that more than about anything else in the recording.
