I thought I had made my peace with Prague.
That was the story I told myself on the flight over, somewhere above the clouds between London and Václav Havel Airport, with a glass of warm white wine I didn’t want and a novel I kept reading the same paragraph of. My cousin Petra was getting married in three days. I had a bridesmaid dress the colour of sage hanging in a garment bag in the overhead locker. I had an itinerary, a hotel room, a role to play. Everything was arranged. Everything was fine.
I had not thought about Alistair Lockhart in eight months. Or so I told myself.
The wedding party descended on Prague like a cheerful, well-dressed storm. Petra’s future mother-in-law, a formidable woman named Dagmar, had booked the entire top floor of a boutique hotel in Old Town, which meant we were all installed within thirty metres of each other for four days with nowhere to retreat. My best friend and fellow bridesmaid, Rosalind, arrived with two suitcases and a bottle of prosecco she opened before we’d even found our rooms.
“This city,” she announced, standing at the window with her glass raised toward the terracotta rooftops, “is criminally underrated.”
“You’ve never been here before,” I said.
“Exactly. Criminal.”
I laughed. It was easy to laugh with Rosalind. She had a gift for filling rooms with noise so that the quiet things inside you couldn’t quite find their footing.
The hotel had a rooftop terrace. Of course it did. Wrought-iron chairs painted black, strings of warm Edison bulbs looped between iron posts, terracotta pots trailing something green and trailing. At one end, a small bar where a young man in a white shirt made coffee with the focused gravity of someone performing surgery. The terrace looked out over the Old Town roofline — a jumble of copper-green domes, red tiles, Gothic spires pressing upward into a sky that, in late September, went a particular shade of blue just before dusk that I had no name for. Not quite lavender. Not quite grey. Something in between that made your chest feel strange.
I went up there the first morning, early, before Rosalind was awake and before Dagmar had organised anyone into a group activity. I wanted coffee. I wanted five minutes of not being a bridesmaid.
He was already there.
Alistair was sitting at the far end of the terrace with his back half-turned, both hands around a small cup, looking out at the city. He’d cut his hair shorter than I remembered. He was wearing a grey linen shirt, slightly creased, the kind of creased that meant he’d slept in his clothes on the plane. I stood very still in the doorway for a moment that lasted approximately one geological age.
Then he turned, because of course he did, and we looked at each other across fifteen feet of Old Town rooftop air.
“Rosalind didn’t tell you,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“Rosalind,” I said carefully, “did not tell me.”
He was the groom’s oldest friend. He was the best man. He had been, eighteen months ago, the person I thought I was going to build something with, before the thing we were building quietly collapsed under the weight of two people who were both too careful and not careful enough at the same time.
I got my coffee. I sat at the opposite end of the terrace. We were very civil.
Rosalind appeared at nine, took one look at the two of us arranged at our respective ends like chess pieces, and said, “Ah.”
“Ah,” I agreed.
“I thought it would be fine,” she said, with the confidence of someone who had clearly thought no such thing. “You’ve both grown. You’re adults. It’s Prague.”
“Those three things are not related.”
“Everything is related in Prague,” she said wisely, and poured herself coffee.
The days moved the way days do at weddings — in a blur of fittings and toasts and Dagmar’s opinions about floral arrangements. Alistair and I moved around each other with the practiced ease of two people who had once known exactly where the other one stood in a room. That was the worst part. Not the awkwardness. The lack of it. The way my body still knew the geometry of him.
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