Her Husband's Best Friend (Can this Marriage Survive #3)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

The roast had been carved and passed, the potatoes were dwindling in their chipped blue bowl, and Carter’s youngest brother, Liam, was already reaching across two people to spear the last piece of bread when the table erupted into laughter at something Savannah had missed.

She laughed anyway, a half-second later, the sound falling neatly into the space between one joke and the next question, which was how she’d learned to do it in these Sunday dinners that had become, over the past year, a fixed point in her calendar.

She and Carter had been married a little less than a year, and during that time she had tried to seamlessly integrate into his family traditions.

The Hayes family dining room smelled of roasted garlic and red wine and something braised for hours until the meat surrendered.

The air was thick with it, warm and close against Savannah’s skin, which she had cooled deliberately before arriving by rolling down the car window despite the October chill.

Her silk-blend dress in muted sage—elegant, considered, exactly right—felt both too light and too warm now, but she did not unbutton the single cuff at her wrist. She kept her hands in her lap when she wasn’t using them, one finger tracing the hem of the tablecloth where it fell against her thigh.

Around her, the Hayes family moved through their ritual with the comfortable chaos of people who had been doing this every Sunday for thirty years.

Carter’s mother lifted serving spoons without looking at what they held, her movements automatic as breathing.

The spoons clinked against ceramic, against glass, against each other when two people reached for the same dish at once and no one apologized.

Carter’s father was telling a story about a client and a missed flight, his voice rising and falling over the general noise, and two of Carter’s brothers were having a separate conversation across the table about a basketball game Savannah had not watched.

Neither conversation paused for the other.

They overlapped and continued, and everyone at the table seemed to understand both threads perfectly.

Savannah passed the bread basket when it reached her right hand.

She did not take a piece for herself. When Carter’s mother mentioned the neighbor’s dog and a flower bed, Savannah leaned forward slightly and said, “The tulips or the hydrangeas?” though she had only caught the words “dog“ and “ruined” and had made an educated guess.

Carter’s mother brightened and launched into the full story, which Savannah listened to with her chin tilted at the exact angle that conveyed both interest and respect.

Her wine glass sat at one-third full. She had calculated this, early in the evening, as the optimal level: enough to show she was participating, not so little that someone would feel compelled to fill it, not so much that she would need to refuse a top-off and create the small friction of a declined offer.

Halfway through the neighbor’s dog story, Carter’s mother reached across with the serving spoon of potatoes and deposited a second helping onto Savannah’s plate without pausing her narrative or looking to see if there was room.

“These won’t keep,” she said, by way of explanation, though Savannah had not asked for one.

Savannah said, “Thank you,” and did not mention that she had been full ten minutes ago.

She picked up her fork and separated a small portion from the new mountain of potatoes.

She would eat enough to be polite. She had learned the math of these dinners: two compliments to the cook, one story volunteered, three follow-up questions, and at least half of whatever was put in front of you, regardless of hunger.

Across the table, Carter’s brother was telling a story about a fishing trip that had gone wrong in seven different ways.

The table was already laughing before he reached the punchline—something about a cooler floating away and a park ranger’s expression—and Savannah watched the laughter move through the room like a wave.

Carter’s father threw his head back. Carter’s mother pressed her napkin to her mouth, her shoulders shaking.

One of the brothers slapped the table with an open palm.

And Carter—Carter laughed with his whole body.

His arm was loosely around the back of Savannah’s chair, his fingers occasionally brushing the fabric of her dress near her shoulder blade, and when the laughter hit him, he leaned forward and then back, his chest expanding, his face opening into something unguarded and bright.

He did not check to see if Savannah was laughing.

He did not moderate his volume or his posture.

Savannah watched him and felt something move through her chest that was not quite nameable.

It was not resentment. She had no wish to trade places with Carter, to have his history or his family or his easy laugh.

It was not annoyance, either—she liked these people, genuinely liked them, with their loud voices and their overlapping stories and their habit of touching each other’s arms when making a point.

She had chosen Carter knowing exactly what his family was, and she did not regret the choice.

What she felt was quieter than that, and more persistent.

It was the faint, constant awareness that she was doing everything right and it still felt like rehearsal.

She had studied the script. She knew her lines.

She hit her marks. She passed the bread and asked the follow-up questions and laughed on cue, and still there was a membrane between herself and the warm, garlic-scented chaos of the Hayes family dinner that she could not quite cross.

Belonging, she thought, watching Carter wipe tears from his eyes as his brother embellished the park ranger story, was not something you could perform your way into. It was something that happened to you, or it didn’t.

It was written into your bones by decades of shared Sundays, by the muscle memory of reaching for the right drawer in the kitchen without looking, by the shorthand of stories that began with “Remember when—” and ended with everyone nodding before the ending arrived.

Savannah took another small bite of potatoes. She set her fork down at the correct angle on her plate. She smiled when Carter’s mother looked her way, and the smile was genuine—she meant it. But she wasn’t quite comfortable in it either.

The bread basket came around again. Savannah passed it without taking a piece. Her wine glass remained at one-third full. Her posture was straight, her shoulders relaxed in the way that required constant, invisible effort.

The front door opened without a knock, which was the first thing Savannah registered—not the sound of a knock, but the absence of it. The handle turning and the cold October air sliding into the warm room before anyone had time to call “Come in.”

Lily Reynolds walked in carrying a bottle of wine and already mid-sentence, her voice carrying over the dining room noise as if she had simply paused her conversation outside and resumed it upon crossing the threshold.

She was talking to someone she had spotted through the window—Carter’s father, it turned out, though she hadn’t needed to see his face to know he would be in his usual chair—and whatever she was saying made him smile before he’d even fully turned to look at her.

Carter’s mother pushed back from the table with both hands on the edge, genuinely pleased to see her. She rose and embraced the newcomer, kissing her on both cheeks. “Lily,” she said, and the name contained three syllables of warmth.

“Hey, Lilith,” called one of Carter’s brothers—the middle one, Evan, whose name Savannah had confused with the youngest for the first three months—using a nickname that sounded both teasing and fond.

Carter turned in his chair. The chair scraped against the floor as he turned, and his smile arrived fully formed, without the half-second of social calculation that preceded most of his smiles in public.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” he said, and the old line landed exactly as intended, because Lily laughed and crossed the room in five strides, wrapping her arms around his neck from behind, and giving him a hug.

She set the wine bottle on the kitchen counter without looking for permission or for a coaster.

She passed behind Carter’s brother and said, “That was Thanksgiving, not Christmas, and you know it,” interrupting a story Savannah hadn’t been following closely enough to catch the error.

Evan shrugged and kept talking, incorporating the correction without missing a beat.

Lily dropped a kiss on Carter’s cheek—quick, familiar, and then she pulled out the empty chair across from Savannah as if it had been saved for her.

It hadn’t been. The empty place had held a serving dish until Carter’s mother moved it to make room for her.

But Lily sat in it as if the chair had been waiting, her movements fluid and unself-conscious, one hand already reaching for the wine opener in the drawer beside the refrigerator without looking.

She knew where it was. She did not ask.

Savannah watched all of this with her hands in her lap and her expression composed. Her wine glass was still at one-third full. She had not touched it since Lily walked in, though her fingers had tightened imperceptibly around the stem.

Lily turned the full warmth of her attention across the table. Her eyes moved over Savannah’s dress, her hair, her posture with the quick, assessing gaze of a woman who understood exactly what she was looking at.