Read an Extract from Pictures of You by Emma Grey

PROLOGUE

My hand fishes surreptitiously through my bag for my phone while a string quartet plays ‘Albinoni’s Adagio’ and reduces everyone around me to tears. My throat is aching from the stress. I try to wring moisture out of dry eyes, judgement burning from all corners of the Mary Immaculate Catholic Church in Waverley, and I fight the urge to escape.

I simply cannot be here.

Shouldn’t be here.

I don’t know these people. Not my mother-in-law, Gwendolyn, dabbing her eyes beside me in that careful way that prioritises the integrity of your mascara over letting go of any real emotion. Not her husband, who hasn’t said a kind word to me since I woke up in hospital a week ago. Not the Gucci suits fidgeting in the pews behind us, glancing at watches and mourning the passing of billable six-minute increments.

And not Oliver Roche. Gloriously good-looking, wildly suc- cessful commercial lawyer. Property investor. Philanthropist and taker of extravagant skiing holidays and European shopping trips, according to the ‘celebration of life’ slideshow in which I am cur- rently co-starring on the big screen.

Love of my life, apparently.

Romantic evidence is blaring in polished, cinematic glory. There I am, growing up at warp speed beside him in the PowerPoint. He’s at his shiny best, all through school and university, on sports fields, at work, socially. I can’t help wondering what it would be like if the accident had claimed my life too, and these same people had to scramble together some sort of highlight reel about me.

A large teardrop diamond flashes on my left ring finger. Gwendolyn, urging me to wear it, frowning as though she couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t want to, said it wasn’t safe to leave the rings lying around at home. I try to feel grateful for it. For all of this. This luxurious life that Oliver and his family brought me into, even though I can’t imagine the steps I must have taken to get tangled up in it.

She looks my way for a second and I strive to squeeze out some sadness. If I concentrate really, really hard and bore the images into my brain of Oliver and me tapping champagne glasses at our engage- ment party, and the way he looks at me in that wedding photo – like I am the world to him – perhaps I’ll remember?

But as summer sunlight streams through stained glass windows and bounces off the handles of the elaborate mahogany and brass coffin, roses trailing up the aisle royal-wedding style – every aspect of this showy farewell is another beacon of the kind of excess I loathe – I don’t feel anything. Except guilt that I am not the perfect widow.

My heart quickens as I imagine the lavish reception the Roches planned for afterwards. It sounds like a Who’s Who of Sydney’s high society. I’ll be expected to make small talk with the kind of people I’ve only ever known from magazine covers and social pages while I continue, in vain, to search the room for Mum, Dad and my best friend, Bree, who I desperately wish were here and who I’ve completely failed to reach. It’s as if I am dead too. Or trapped in some fever-induced nightmare from which I’m longing to wake up and can’t.

But there’s no fever. I’m not sick. And their inexplicable absence is snowballing even more panic – adrenaline coursing, nausea brewing until I can’t take another second of this whole performance.