A Bad Bride's Tale (2008)

Polly Williams's second novel, published by Hyperion in 2008, follows Stevie Jonson, a graphic designer in her mid-thirties whose life comes apart at the seams in the two weeks before her wedding, with her best friend Lara moving to New York, her parents' marriage heading for the rocks and, the jacket says, a teenage crush reappearing. Among the women around her is Katy Norris, a booker at a makeup-artist agency in Notting Hill whose boyfriend Seb is on a contract with a New York bank. (Open Library)

Watches

Hermès (unidentified model): Waiting out the three minutes of a pregnancy test in her cream-carpeted living room, having missed a pill and asked her doctor how long she has left, Katy checks her Hermes watch with two minutes to go and pictures Seb waking in midtown Manhattan, then checks it again at one minute thirty-one seconds while digging a lip gloss out of her Gucci handbag. The text spells the maker without its accent and gives no model.

Source text: Katy checked her Hermes watch. Two minutes to go. She wondered what her other half was doing. (Polly Williams, A Bad Bride's Tale, scan cataloged as Hyperion, 2008, p. 48, closing up the OCR's line-break hyphen in "wondered"; she checks the watch again on p. 49; her full name opens the chapter on p. 47; Internet Archive scan OCR)