Bridesmaids meets Emily in Paris —in London—in this hilarious and heartfelt story of one handsome neighbor, one no-good ex, and the summer Amy Duffy makes the comeback of her life.
Intriuged? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Lizzy Dent’s The Sweetest Revenge, which is out now!
Her past is a mess. But her present is about to get delicious.
Amy is more than one disastrous night of drunken revenge on her boss/ex-boyfriend’s Audi—the night that tanked her rising TV producer career and led to a hasty move to London for a fresh start. She is thirty years of awesomeness. At least, that’s what Amy tells herself every morning before trekking to her mediocre job making trailers at a failing British TV channel.
Two years later, she’s finally starting to believe it. Sparks are flying between her and Jake, her handsome new downstairs neighbor, and there’s a competition at work that just might get her career back on track while bringing her and Jake even closer. But then, in a twisted turn of fate, the ex-boyfriend who wrecked her life is hired as her new boss and past and present are about to epically, hilariously collide.
“We need to talk.”
Nothing good ever comes after that sentence. Nothing. All I can think is: Whatever happens, do not let him talk to you about anything until you’re on that fucking train.
“You need to get ready,” I say lightly, nodding toward the dry-cleaning bag slung over his bed. “I picked up your suit, and there’s a coffee waiting for you. Or a whiskey. Whichever you need.”
I can see the seriousness in his dark brown eyes as he remains fixed on me. He lifts his hand to his face and rubs his freshly shaved chin. “Okay, but then we need to talk.”
For now it’s enough to know we’re still going to get the train, but I’m anxious. Work? Incurable disease? Us? My phone buzzes again, and I leap to the bed to free it from its charger.
“Amy. You better be on top of Bradley fucking Cooper,” shouts Ruth, my cousin and the bride-to-be. The phone is then handed to my mother, who continues the dressing-down. “Everyone’s waiting for you, Amy.”
“And I’m the one who is supposed to keep everyone waiting!” shouts Ruth in the background. “I’m the fucking bride!”
“I’m so sorry, Mom, Chris just got home, he had a meeting—”
“I’m not sure a meeting is more important than your cousin’s wedding.”
“I’m not going to miss it!” I shout, impatient now. “I’m standing here in the damn dress. The train leaves in forty-five minutes.”
“This guy can’t drive you both in his fancy car?” she says. I had already made the grave error of mentioning his new car. In my concern they might not like Chris, I’d oversold him and turned him into a rich asshole.
“The Uber has been ordered,” I reply.
I hang up the phone and quickly order an Uber.
Moments later, Chris, who seems to be moving at a glacial pace, emerges from the bathroom in a pale blue linen suit and cream shirt. No tie. I melt like butter at the sight of him. He always looks so put together. So clean somehow. But I say playfully, “We’re going to Long Island, not the Bahamas.” My massive family will all be in off-the-rack suits and ties and Chris is going to stand out like a walking GQ cover.
“I thought it was going to match you. But I’m afraid Tom Ford doesn’t do that shade of virgin blue,” he says teasingly as I fiddle with the top of the bridesmaid dress, trying to squeeze a little cleavage out of the modest neckline. “Although it has improved with you in it.” He smiles flirtatiously at me. Chris always knows how to weaken me. A single raised eyebrow can have my pants off in a whip. I glance down at the dress. Ruth hadn’t done a terrible job with the design—but it did come off a little polygamist Mormon for my taste.
“Only polyester taffeta can deliver this kind of shine,” I say, grinning at him. But I’m anxious. He seems to sense this and pulls me close, delivering a heavy kiss on my lips, crushing the skirt of my dress. I want to collapse into him. “Mind the gown,” I say instead, pushing him back.
“I do really need to talk to you,” he says in that crisp, upbeat business tone I was used to hearing in the boardroom at work. Sexy. Strong. Capable.
“I love you,” I reply, “but this is the first time you’re going to meet my family, and they’re going to be at their most insane, so let’s talk later.”
Chris is an only child, and he grew up in Providence, and although I’ve never been there, nor have I met his parents, I can just imagine his quiet picket-fenced cul-de-sac, with a boat in the driveway and an organized recycling area. And his parents: slim, refined, and classy—but also slightly terrifying (because what did they really think?). My family, on the other hand, is like walking into a room full of kindergartners on a sugar high, but with six-foot men and beer. Within thirty seconds of arrival, my brother, Floyd, will give Chris an excruciating nickname, one that pierces the very heart of who Chris is. It will exemplify a truly extraordinary ability to read people, and in some ways is a superpower, but all I will hear is my brother calling my boyfriend the Little Stinger because he’s only five nine and a WASP.
“Amy, we need to talk now,” he replies, and then after a beat of staring at me in a way that makes me stiffen with unease, he adds, “We’re not going ahead with the series, Amy.”
“What do you mean, we’re not going ahead with the series?”
I shift to autopilot, picking up my overnight bag and moving toward the front door. I push it open and walk down the stairs, then out onto his stoop and the tree-lined street.
“The Uber is here,” I call to hurry him along, my eyes on his brand-new silver Audi, which could get us there in half the time and hassle. He’s moving so slowly. Or am I running? I feel like I’m running. I feel like I’m running away from what he’s telling me, as though if I stay a few feet ahead, the information will not catch up with me.
“The content board met, and that was the decision,” he says as we slide into the back seat of the car.
“I see,” I reply, the gravity of this situation too overwhelming to fully accept or even acknowledge. I swallow a scream. It can’t be. It’s a mistake. It’s a temporary setback.
I have been working on The Darkening Web for as long as I’ve been at Wolf Studios. It’s a crime series set between Palo Alto and Pebble Beach in Northern California, in the creepy underbelly of Silicon Valley. Pitched as Big Little Lies meets Ozark, with a Black Mirror twist, it’s four years of my blood, sweat, and tears.
In TV development, having a show fall down before being greenlit is all part of the game. It’s happened a dozen times in my career, but this one, this one that I adored, was meant to fly. This was my moment. I had the most incredible showrunner poised to sign on. A brilliant young writer had drafted a pilot script described by the VP of development as a game changer. All it needed was the green-light team to say yes, and we would be moving to pitch and, hopefully, pilot.
This was the meeting that had been important enough to stay for. The meeting that I missed my cousin’s rehearsal dinner for. The meeting where, Chris promised, he would finally get the green light for my show.
As we pull up to Atlantic Terminal, Chris is still trying to get me to talk about it.
“I can’t,” I repeat for the hundredth time, pulling away from his pitying arm, which he’s trying to drape around my shoulders. “I wish you’d waited to tell me.”
“I just want you to understand why I voted—”
“You voted?” I say, jumping out of the car, tugging him toward the building. “You voted to green-light it. Because it’s brilliant and because you said you would.”
“I didn’t vote for it,” he says, frowning.
“Sorry, did I mishear?” I say, spinning around to face him.
“Amy—I’m your boss. That’s a reality,” he says, dropping his canvas weekender to the sidewalk. He puts his hands on my shoulders, squeezing me lightly. “Today we become official. I’m meeting your family, and people at work are starting to figure it out.”
“What does this have to do with The Darkening Web?” I ask, although I suspect I know the answer.
“I can’t be seen to be favoring my girlfriend,” he says, and I cringe.
“Your girlfriend? I was a development executive first,” I say, “a pretty fucking good one too.”
“You understand, though?” he asks, shaking out his hand so his stupid, expensive vintage watch slides down his wrist. Then he checks the time and looks at me with a great deal of discomfort. “I was worried about the blowback. It’s highly unprofessional, what we’re doing. I can’t be fucking you and then elevating your work. It looks terrible.”
I raise my hands to my face. “Oh my God,” I say finally. “Oh my God. Four years of my work. Four years!”
“We talked about this,” he says impatiently. “I explained to you that it would be problematic. I gave you options.”
“You gave me the option to let you pitch it as yours. I thought you were joking!”
Chris shrugs at this. “It made the most sense. That way, no one thinks I’ve made a decision with my dick. And your project can be viewed without bias.”
“But it’s mine!” I say, stamping my heeled foot as I say it.
“Of course it is, to everyone else. It would have only been the network heads who would have thought otherwise.”
I cannot make sense of what he is saying to me. I just keep shaking my head in disbelief.
“I thought you’d want to keep exploring whatever this is becoming,” he says, frantically motioning between the two of us. “I can’t green-light a potentially fifty-million-per-season show for my girlfriend. Can you not see this? I thought you would get it.”
I can’t speak. I thought you would get it. I feel sucker punched. My thoughts are scattered like confetti in a hurricane.
“You must have known there was going to be a conflict,” he says. “I’m your boss. I do your annual review. I can’t grade you at your day job when you’ve just given me a blow job.” Chris half laughs at this. I feel like I’m going to throw up.
“Sorry, that was supposed to be a joke,” he says now, rubbing his face with both hands and then resting one hand back on my shoulder.
“Ugh,” I say, shrugging him off. I hold my hand to my stomach, the layers of taffeta skirting crunching under my fingers. “I can’t believe you.” I feel my lip start to quiver and turn swiftly away from him, marching into the building.
“Amy!” he says in a tone one might use for a toddler as he follows behind.
I close my eyes and stop short as a cascade of visceral memories floods my brain. Kisses in elevators. Cocktails in hotel bars. His hand inching up my bare thigh at the Independent Screen Awards dinner. Him on his knees, face buried between my legs behind the changing room’s curtain at Saks. Making love on the beach on Fire Island, me staring up at the stars. The words. The promises. My stomach lurches, and I open my eyes to see Chris looking into the distance, a deep crevasse between his eyebrows. He looks different suddenly.
“Let’s just go, Amy,” he is saying, leading me down the stairs toward the platform so I have to follow him now. “You’re becoming overly emotional,” he says over his shoulder.
I narrow my eyes, scoffing in disgust, as I’m elbowed in the ribs by a rushing commuter. “Don’t say that. God, I knew you were cutthroat, but I never saw the knife at my own throat.”
“Oh, come on,” he says, turning back as he takes his place on the platform edge, and I spot a brief eye roll. “I chose us. I thought you’d be pleased.”
“You chose yourself,” I retort, setting down my bag. “You were worried you would look bad. Chris, you’ve just killed my whole dream. The dream of everyone who worked on it, because you didn’t want to admit that you fell in love . . .” I pause to consider this word anew. Is he even in love with me? “. . . that you were involved with a junior person on your staff.”
“No, I chose us. I’m coming to this wedding with you, aren’t I?”
The train pulls into the station, and the wind picks up my skirt, which puffs up like a pastel lampshade. I pick up my bag, remaining dignified. “Let’s just go,” I say.
Chris hesitates. It’s subtle, but I see it and pounce.
“You don’t want to come?”
“It’s fine,” he replies. “I said I would.”
“You don’t want to come.” My voice is tight now.
“Amy, no one wants to come to a family wedding where the only person they know is a bridesmaid. I’m coming for you.”
I feel a deep sense of dread in the pit of my stomach. This is wrong. I don’t want someone dragging themselves to somewhere they don’t want to be out of obligation. I want Chris to want to come because he wants to know my family. Because being invited excites him. Maybe even makes him nervous. Because it’s an honor to be asked. I think about how he was dragging his feet to get ready. How I had to arrange the dry cleaning. How he insisted we catch the very last possible train because, despite my asking him three months ago, he still booked in a morning of meetings today. Including, unconscionably, the meeting that canceled my show.
I narrow my eyes, staring at Chris hard while I compute this new reality.
I suddenly don’t want him anywhere near my family.
“You know what? Fuck you,” I say. “Don’t fucking come.”
“I’m coming,” he says, heading toward the train door.
“I’m uninviting you,” I say.
“You’re overreacting to a work issue and convoluting the two,” he says, holding the train door open as the train whistles. “Which is exactly why I had to block your show.”
People say the line between love and hate is thin, but I am truly stunned to find how thin it is. It’s thin like rice paper, apparently. I glare at him as everything around us blurs. In TV we call this pulling focus, but in real life it’s more like a momentary madness. Everything is silent except for the sound of the blood boiling in my veins. Block my show?
He’s saying something to me now, but I can’t hear it. It’s like he’s speaking in slow motion. Block my fucking show?
“Amy!” I feel his hands on my shoulders, shaking me. I spin around to see the train as it pulls away, and we are standing there on an empty platform, bags at our feet, my cousin’s wedding slowly becoming a thing I was not just going to be late for but going to actually miss.
“Fuck!” I shout. “I have to call another bloody Uber. All the way to the venue now. What’s the use of a fucking convertible that never leaves your driveway?”
My head is spinning and my throat is dry, but I am fixed on the most important task now—getting to the wedding.
“I explained that I don’t like driving it on freeways,” Chris replies evenly, hands thrust into his stupid linen pants. He lets out a deep sigh. “Amy, I can’t deal with this.”
My breath catches in my throat.
“I thought you loved me. I thought this was going somewhere,” he says.
I exhale through my nose, slowly, trying to calm myself.
“I do love you,” I say, my voice faltering. “I’m trying to take you to meet my family.”
“But you’d rather have your show than have me,” he says.
“It’s my show. Why can’t I have both?” I hear the whimpering in my voice now.
“You don’t get it,” he says, picking up his overnight bag. He smiles grimly at me. Pityingly, even. Before turning and heading back up the stairs.
“I’m calling an Uber,” I shout after him. “Wait!”
“I think we both need to cool off. Let’s talk when you’re back,” he replies over his shoulder as he walks away. “I’m going home.”
It takes me a moment to figure out that he doesn’t want me to follow him. I stand there stunned as the air is squeezed out of me, wondering if this is my fault. What the hell just happened?
A few hours later, I’m sitting at the Dirty Dog’s Lounge, five minutes’ walk from the train station, with a small circle of people crowded around me. It was meant to be one quick drink. A straightener, as I pulled my shit together. But I’m into my eighth bourbon, and now I have my own entourage; they came for the wild dress and stayed for the feminist raging.
“And then he says, You don’t love me!” I am slurring, pulling Jim from Queens by the collar as I use him as my stand-in Chris for more dramatic effect. “And I said, I’m taking you to meet my family, you stupid asshole. And then he said, You’d rather have your show than me.”
“That’s Gaslighting 101,” says a woman, raising her glass toward me to accentuate the point. “A gaslighter. Just like my ex-husband.”
“More toxic than this fucking mai tai,” says another. “By the way, honey, you’ve got a false eyelash stuck to your cheek.”
“You need to call your mom, Cinderella,” says the bartender, pulling the bourbon out of my reach.
“So, I’m right to be angry,” I say to the animated groans and angry gesticulations of my audience. I am right to be angry. He was gaslighting me.
“You know what?” I stand, knocking over my stool in the process. “I’m going to go and tell him what an absolute prick he is. I’m going to walk to his stupid apartment and I’m going to knock on his stupid door and I’m going to tell him.”
My phone rings for the hundredth time, and under the influence of adrenaline and bourbon, and the encouragement of my gaggle of daytime drunks, I throw the phone into a pint of beer, and everyone cheers. “You guys love drama,” I say, feeling momentarily sober as I stare at the tiny bubbles escaping my submerged iPhone 13.
I take another shot, and before I know it, I’m stumbling toward his apartment in Prospect Park, drinking the dregs of the bourbon I swiped from the bar, the long skirts of my bridesmaid dress floating in my wake. I wave at the folks who stare, and occasionally shout “Asshole!” to the sky. I am crazed.
As I turn onto Chris’s street, my mood darkens further.
I pass his brand-new silver Audi TT convertible and kick the hubcap, injuring my toe in the process, before heading up the short flight of stairs to his front door. I ring, I knock, I shout, I ring, and I shout some more.
Someone from a neighboring apartment yells for me to “shut the hell up!” but it only serves to rile me further. Where the fuck is he?
“Where are you, you gaslighting son of a bitch?” I scream.
I turn back to the street and plunk down on the stairs, glaring out at the symbol of my hate: that stupid car. Who the hell is too scared to drive on an expressway? I mean, I am, but I don’t own a car specifically designed to speed on expressways with the top down.
Suddenly, possessed, I stand and lift the several layers of my skirt and walk toward his car. I slide my shoes off and climb up on the hood to the roof of the car. Then I pull my underwear down and feel a cathartic release as I pee onto the canvas roof of his Audi TT.
A moment later, my stockinged foot slips on a runaway trail of pee, and I cascade backward onto the roof of the car, my skirt rising in a blue poof of cheap fabric as the canvas top buckles underneath me. And then I cackle. I cackle and I cackle, and at some point the cackling turns to sobbing.
I lie there in a pile of polyester, the sky a darkening blue, the clouds turning a slight pink, and I think about Ruth’s wedding. They would be heading to the tent for dinner, an empty seat at the head table where my sorry ass should be. I think about my mom and how deeply I have let her down. I think about my show, and the four years’ work that came to an end because I decided it was worth it to explore an office affair with my boss. And I think about Chris, and my heart squeezes. Despite everything, I am grieving, because no matter how much I hate him right now, I also love him.
How quickly a day can turn from giddy excitement, full of hope and possibility, to this: a fugitive bridesmaid, lying in a pool of her own pee, on the collapsed roof of her boss/boyfriend’s car, probably expelled from her family for life.
“The only way is up,” I whisper quietly to the heavens, deciding I’d better escape the scene of the crime. I groan as I realize I’ve hurt my butt in the fall.
And then I hear it. “Oh my God, did you get it?”
“All of it,” says another voice. “Holy shit, that’s hilarious. Look at that fall.”
My heart picks up, and I try to crane my neck to see. Who is that?
“Is that Amy Duffy?” says the first voice.
No.
“Holy shit, that ballbuster from Wolf?” says the second voice.
That ballbuster?
No.
No!
“Hello? Who’s there?” I ask, panicking, craning my neck in all directions. “This is not what it looks like. Also, why am I a ballbuster?”
“Shit,” one of the voices says, “let’s go.” And then the sound of steps hurrying off down the street.
I pull my head up, struggling to see, stuck in the huge dent I’ve made in the Audi’s soft top. But I can just spot the back of them. Two men, one clutching an iPhone, and the end of my life as I know it.
