Her Husband's Best Friend Planned Her Murder (Can this Marriage Survive #8)

Chapter 1

Felicity stood with her hands wrapped around an empty ceramic mug, watching the steam rise from the spout of the matte-black kettle.

The kitchen was entirely silent except for that water, a vast expanse of polished concrete and white quartz that always felt slightly too large when Tucker was in the city.

It was a beautiful room, the kind featured in architectural magazines to illustrate "the luxury of minimalism," but to Felicity, it mostly felt like a stage waiting for the actors to arrive.

She turned to the open cupboard to her left.

Before pouring the water, she adjusted the mugs on the second shelf.

They were arranged strictly by height, their handles all turned precisely forty-five degrees to the right, creating a neat gradient of blues and greens that faded into charcoal gray.

Tucker called it her "garrison," a harmless eccentricity he occasionally pointed out to dinner guests with an affectionate, patronizing roll of his eyes. Lissy likes her ceramics to look like they’re marching into battle, he’d say, and everyone would laugh, and she would smile and let them believe it was just a cute, quirky manifestation of a neat-freak’s soul.

In reality, it was just a small way to keep the quiet from feeling too chaotic, a tiny grid of order in a house that still felt entirely like Tucker's design.

"Mrs. Sanderson?"

Karen’s voice drifted down from the second floor, followed by the heavy, deliberate thud of the vacuum cleaner being dragged down the floating staircase.

Karen had been cleaning for them twice a week since they moved out of the city.

She was a woman of few words and immense routine, a person who moved through the house with the grim efficiency of a soldier, never altering the order of her tasks.

Thursdays were always bathrooms first, then the master bedroom, then the downstairs floors.

"In the kitchen, Karen," Felicity called back, turning as the cleaner reached the bottom step.

Karen adjusted the strap of her denim apron, her face settling into its usual expression of mild, professional defensiveness.

She always looked as though she expected to be scolded for using the wrong polish on the concrete.

"I’m just about through upstairs. I left the fresh linens on the cedar chest in the hallway like you asked.

Do you want me to run the dishwasher before I leave? "

"No, that's fine. Tucker and I are having dinner with Brianne, so I'll just run it then," Felicity said, offering a small, practiced smile.

This was the currency of their interaction: small, harmless updates about the weekend schedule to prove that Felicity was an approachable, stable employer.

"How is your daughter doing with the new school? "

"Oh, she's fine. Adjusting," Karen said, already looking toward the mudroom where her heavy winter coat hung.

She wasn't one for small talk, but she tolerated Felicity's polite inquiries with a nod.

"I noticed Mr. Sanderson left his golf shoes in the hall closet again instead of the garage.

I moved them back out to the workbench so they wouldn't track the mud. "

"Thank you. I'll remind him."

“And don’t forget I’m visiting my daughter in Sheboygan for three weeks, so I’ll see you when I get back.”

“Give her my best. I hope you have a nice trip.”

It was a completely normal conversation.

It was the exact kind of mundane domestic friction that filled the spaces of a long-term marriage—the shoes left in the wrong place, the branches that needed trimming, the small adjustments to a shared schedule.

When Karen finally left, the heavy front door clicking shut with a mechanical hiss as the deadbolt automatically slid into place, Felicity felt a familiar, quiet wave of relief.

She liked the quiet, even if it sometimes stretched a little too thin.

She carried her tea into the living room, her bare feet making no sound on the cool floor.

The house was cold today; the automated thermostat was supposed to kick on at three, but the chill of the woods seemed to seep through the glass long before that.

She settled onto the charcoal linen sofa, pulling a knitted throw over her ankles, and reached for the book she had left on the side table that morning.

Except the side table was empty.

Felicity frowned, her hand hovering over the bare wood for a second.

She distinctly remembered carrying the paperback—a historical biography she’d bought at the depot bookstore on Tuesday—down from the bedroom after breakfast. Or had she left it upstairs on her nightstand when she went up to change out of her morning sweater?

She sighed softly, amused by her own forgetfulness.

This was the sort of small, irritating lapse in memory that had become more frequent since they moved.

In the city, everything had its place because space was at a premium; here, things seemed to drift across the vast square footage, disappearing into corners only to turn up days later in plain sight.

Upstairs, the master bedroom smelled faintly of lavender and the lemon-scented wood polish Karen used on the dressers. The bed was perfectly made, the charcoal duvet pulled taut across the mattress without a single wrinkle. Karen’s handiwork.

But as Felicity glanced over at her bedside table, her brow furrowed.

Beside her reading lamp sat a book, but it wasn't her biography.

It was a trade edition with a dark, matte cover, titled The Inconvenient Wife by an author named Bethany Bricker.

The stark silhouette of a Victorian house bled into a dark, foggy forest on the front.

Felicity turned it over in her hands, her thumb smoothing down the crisp, uncracked spine. It was brand new, the pages smelling of fresh ink and cheap glue. A small, expectant smile formed at the corners of her mouth. Tucker. It had to be Tucker.

He must have bought it on his way home last night and slipped it onto her side of the bed while she was in the shower, knowing exactly how much she loved these kinds of domestic thrillers.

He knew her vices; he tolerated her appetite for paperbound mysteries because it kept her occupied during the long hours he spent at the office.

It was a sweet, silent gesture—the kind of quiet attentiveness he used to make up for a late night at the firm.

She carried the thriller back downstairs, the weight of it a pleasant density against her palm. She curled back into the sofa, the tea warming her fingers, and opened to page one.

The story opened on a gray afternoon very much like this one.

The prose was languid, heavy with atmosphere, detailing the quiet routine of a woman named Fiona who lived in a secluded house surrounded by dense woods.

Felicity settled deeper into the cushions, letting the rhythm of the sentences wash over her.

She liked the author's voice; it was observant, capturing the specific, heavy stillness of a large house when a woman is left entirely to her own devices. Fiona’s husband, Arthur, was only a shadow in the first chapter—a presence felt through the things he left behind: a gold watch on the dresser, a damp towel hung over the back of a chair, a certain way of taking up space even when he was miles away in the city.

It was comfortable. It was exactly what Felicity looked for in a book—a slow, creeping narrative that felt deliciously removed from her own safe, predictable life.

She read through the first three chapters without moving, watching the afternoon light gradually shift across the concrete floor, casting long, skeletal shadows from the window frames.

By five o'clock, the wind outside had died down, leaving the woods completely motionless. Felicity turned the page to chapter four. The fictional house was quiet. Fiona was in her kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil, looking out at the gravel driveway.

Felicity took a sip of her tea, her eyes tracking down the page, and then she stopped.

The text described Fiona opening her kitchen cupboard.

The author noted, with a brief, dry sentence, how Fiona felt a sudden, familiar spike of irritation because the mugs on the second shelf were slightly out of alignment.

The book explicitly stated that Fiona preferred them arranged strictly by height, their handles all turned precisely forty-five degrees to the right, creating a neat gradient of color from light to dark. Arthur always called it her "garrison."

Felicity blinked, a soft, breathy chuckle escaping her lips. She stared at the word. Garrison.

"No way," she whispered to the empty room, her smile widening.

She lowered the book to her lap, looking over the top of the pages toward her own kitchen cupboard, visible through the wide archway of the living room.

It was an absolutely incredible, bizarre stroke of coincidence.

Writers stole from real life all the time, of course, or maybe lining up mugs by height with handles at forty-five degrees was just a far more common psychological quirk than she had ever realized.

But the name—garrison—was what made it perfect.

She felt a sudden, bright spark of excitement, the kind that comes from finding a weirdly specific cosmic joke in the middle of a mundane afternoon.

It was a brilliant little anecdote. She could already picture the look on Tucker’s face when she showed it to him tonight.

He would probably claim he secretly wrote the book himself just to tease her, or he’d laugh and say that this Bethany Bricker woman must have been spying on their kitchen window with binoculars.

Felicity folded the corner of the page down to mark the spot, careful not to lose the paragraph.

She couldn't wait for the garage door to rumble open at six-fifteen. She set the book face-up on the coffee table, her mood lifted by the funny fluke, entirely eager to hear the confident click of Tucker’s oxfords on the hardwood floor so she could share the laugh.