The Season of Change by Sheila O'Flanagan

Author:Sheila O'Flanagan [O'Flanagan, Sheila]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Women, General
ISBN: 9781473699090
Google: kTOcDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Hachette Books Ireland
Published: 2019-08-07T23:00:00+00:00

Room 608 (Isobel)

Everyone was talking about the wedding incident. The fact that the girl chickened out at the last minute and that all the planning – the gorgeous dress, the bower of palms and brightly coloured tropical flowers, the Caribbean band, the photos on the fine white sand – all of it had come to nothing because none of it was going to take place now. It was the hot topic of conversation around the hotel and I wasn’t one bit surprised. Everyone was speaking in hushed tones and saying how sorry they felt for the groom, who’d waited patiently for nearly an hour in the gazebo at the edge of the turquoise water for his bride to show up before realising that the wedding wasn’t going to happen. Sympathy was very definitely on his side and I understood that, of course I did. He’d been humiliated in front of loads of people. As for her – well, everyone agreed better now than later, but there was a definite feeling that she could at least have gone ahead with it given the amount of planning that had gone on and just have it annulled afterwards.

Despite the wedding fiasco most of the guests had made the best of it. At first they’d disappeared from the bar and foyer where wedding guests normally gathered, but later that evening a group of them had arrived down to dinner and had partied later to the sounds of the calypso band. The reluctant bride had apparently headed off to a different hotel with some of her closest friends, so I suppose the remaining guests felt as though they might as well get what they could out of the evening, safe in the knowledge that she wouldn’t reappear looking pale and wan and devastated.

I felt sorry for her, though, no matter why she’d done it. I knew exactly how she was feeling because I’d felt that way myself.

People really don’t know how to treat you when you’ve abandoned your fiancé with minutes to go before tying the knot. They’re a little bit scared of you, tread warily around you, talking about something completely different but wanting only to ask you why on earth you did it. Maybe they feel that the kind of girl who would leave a man sweltering in his tux on a tropical island in front of a gaggle of interested spectators, or the kind of girl who’d leave someone standing at the altar in front of a packed church while fleeing down the aisle before leaping into the waiting Merc, is the kind of person who’d do anything. And they’re afraid that you might do anything in front of them. That’s my theory anyway. That’s the reason why I didn’t think that girl’s life would ever be the same again. That’s the reason mine wasn’t either, after I dumped Tim at the altar.

I hadn’t intended to dump him, of course. Right up to the moment where the priest asked ‘Do you Isobel

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