It was just after midnight. Iryna Stetsenko had finished doing her nails for her wedding, opened the balcony door and was battling her nerves to get to sleep.
In a nearby apartment packed with guests, her fiancé Serhiy Lobanov was asleep on a mattress in the kitchen.
Then a "rumble" disturbed the quiet, says Iryna. "It was as if a lot of planes were flying overhead, everything was humming and the glass in the windows shook."
Serhiy says he "felt a shake, as if some kind of wave passed", wondered if it was a mild earthquake, and fell back to sleep.
The 19-year-old trainee teacher and power plant engineer, who was 25, were looking forward to married life in the newly built Soviet city of Pripyat. They had no idea that the world's worst ever nuclear accident was unfolding less than 2.5 miles (4km) away.
