Chapter 2
Chapter Two
The apartment floor was warm under the cardboard boxes, the takeout containers from the Thai place on Clement Street breathing their last fragrant sighs into the evening air. Savannah sat cross-legged, her silk blouse loosened at the wrists, her hair fallen from its careful arrangement.
Ribbon pooled between them in soft, translucent curls, pale green and ivory, the colors of their wedding invitations. They were finally getting around to unboxing their wedding gifts, now that they were settled in their new place.
Carter had dismantled the largest box and now the pieces lay scattered across the hardwood.
He wore a gray t-shirt and no socks, his feet bare against the floor, one ankle crossed over the other as he balanced a set of monogrammed linen napkins on his knee and read the gift card aloud in a voice pitched to sound like a nineteenth-century butler announcing a duke.
“’To the happy couple,’” he intoned, holding the card at arm’s length as if it were written in a language he was translating on the fly.
“’May your table always be set with love and your napkins never—’ Christ, what is that word?
‘Never crease unduly.’ Unduly! Who says unduly in a gift card?
My great-aunt Margaret, that’s who. God bless her seventy-year-old heart. ”
Savannah laughed.
His eyes found hers across the half-dismantled box, and he held her laugh in his gaze the way he sometimes held her face between his hands—with a gentleness that suggested he understood exactly what he was holding.
He reached across the cardboard and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, his fingers brushing the curve of her jaw.
The gesture was continuous with the moment, as if touching her was simply another form of speaking.
“Your aunt Margaret,” Savannah said, recovering, lifting a piece of pad thai with her chopsticks, “writes like someone who has never creased a napkin unduly in her life. I bet she irons her dish towels.”
“She irons her socks,” Carter said, and Savannah laughed again.
Her hand moved through the remaining boxes, sorting by size and weight.
Her fingers landed on something small and flat, wrapped in kraft paper and tied with a ribbon the color of old gold, the exact shade used at their wedding reception for the table numbers and the place cards.
She turned the box over. The tag was handwritten in black ink, the letters rounded and confident: To Carter & Savannah.
She did not recognize the handwriting.
She set the box down. She picked up her chopsticks and separated a piece of chicken from the noodles.
Carter was already reaching for the next box, a larger one with a shipping label from Williams-Sonoma, his attention already leaping forward to the next task. He tore into the tape with his thumbnail, talking as he worked.
“Bet this is the thing my mom mentioned. The—what did she call it? The thing for making your own pasta, which we will absolutely never use, but she’ll ask about it every time we see her, and I’ll have to lie and say we made ravioli last Tuesday.”
Savannah loved this about him. She loved the ease of him, the way he existed in the world without the constant, invisible effort that characterized her own existence. She had chosen him for this, among other things—his warmth, his openness, the way he offered himself to her without reservation.
Carter had pulled a pasta maker from the box and was holding the assembly instructions upside down, narrating his confusion with the delighted bewilderment of a man who found his own incompetence amusing.
The gold ribbon was the same shade as the ones that had tied the place cards at their wedding, and looking at it now, loose on the apartment floor, Savannah felt the memory arrive as a physical sensation—the cool air off the lake, the weight of a navy dress against her knees, the light that comes from string bulbs hung over water.
Eighteen months ago. A lakeside charity benefit for something involving children and literacy, the kind of event Savannah had attended dozens of times in her professional life and had learned to move through.
She stood near the bar in a navy dress that had cost more than she wanted to admit, holding a glass of white wine she had no intention of drinking, and watched a man across the room argue cheerfully with a waiter about whether the passed appetizers counted as dinner.
“Listen,” the man was saying, his voice carrying just enough to reach her without seeming performative, “if I eat four of these—and I’m going to eat four of these—that’s a meal. That’s the math. I’m not asking for your blessing, I’m informing you of a biological fact.”
The waiter, who had the weathered patience of a seasoned servicre worker shrugged and moved on.
The man—Carter, though she did not know his name yet—popped a miniature quiche into his mouth and reached for a second one with the unhurried confidence of a man who had never worried about being watched.
He caught her watching. His eyes found hers across the room with a directness that made her want to look away and also made her want to keep looking. He winked at her. She blushed, bit her lip, and looked away.
He did not hesitate. He crossed the floor between them in six strides, weaving through clusters of people without appearing to navigate, and when he reached her he said, “You look like someone who’s been to too many of these.”
She told him she had. Twenty-seven, by her count, though she did not share the number.
“Me too,” he said. “Want to leave?”
They did not leave. They stayed four hours, moving from the bar to the dock to a bench near the water where the music from the tent reached them in muffled waves. But the offer was the thing.
Their courtship moved fast but not carelessly.
Carter brought her into his world with both hands open, presenting it to her like something he had been saving.
Loud Sunday dinners where everyone talked at once.
His mother’s kitchen with its worn counters and the drawer that stuck unless you lifted it just so.
His brother’s terrible taste in movies, which they watched anyway, Carter laughing at the wrong moments on purpose.
His father’s habit of telling the same three stories again and again, each one slightly altered with each telling.
Savannah, who had grown up in a house where warmth was rationed in careful doses and approval was conditional on achievement measured in visible metrics, found herself leaning into all of it.
She let Carter’s mother teach her how to roll pie crust. She let his brother explain the plot of a science fiction movie she had already seen.
She let his father tell the story about the missed flight for the third time, and she laughed at the same beat each time, and the laughter was real because sharing the absurdity of the moment with Carter’s family felt like belonging.
Carter, for his part, loved that she was precise, that she noticed the small tear in his jacket lining before he did, that she laughed at the right moments and always said and did the right thing in public.
Once, early on, driving home from a dinner where she had handled a difficult client with a grace that cost her something internal, he said, “You’re the kindest person I’ve ever met. ”
She kept that. She wrote it down later, in the notes app on her phone, though she would never tell him she had done so.
She met Lily Reynolds at a backyard barbecue three months in.
Lily arrived with a six-pack of beer and a hug for Carter that lasted a beat too long, her hand on the back of his neck, curling in his hair, in a way that suggested ownership rather than affection.
She looked Savannah over with the quick, assessing gaze of a woman taking inventory, and said, “So you’re the one who finally landed him,” which was not a question and was not friendly, but which Carter laughed off as if it had been both.
“Lily’s been giving me grief since we were six,” he said, his arm around Savannah’s waist, and Lily’s smile was sickly sweet.
“Someone has to,” Lily said, and reached for Carter’s beer without asking, taking a swig of it, then handing it back to him.
Savannah was put off. She noted the possessiveness, the territorial edge in Lily’s voice when she spoke about Carter’s history, the way she inserted herself into conversations with the certainty of someone who believed she had earned the right.
But Savannah did not make it an issue. She had been raised to choose her battles with care, to distinguish between genuine threats and mere discomfort, and Lily struck her as the latter—an old friend with boundary issues, not a rival.
Carter loved Lily and she was a part of his life.
That was enough for Savannah to put aside her discomfort and smile politely whenever they met.
The proposal came seven months in, on the dock behind his parents’ lake house, after a black-tie fundraiser they had both been dreading for weeks.
Savannah was still in her gown, a column of dark green silk that had cost more than her first car, her heels abandoned on the grass, her bare feet on the dock planks still warm from the afternoon sun.
The lake was quiet, the water making its small, consistent sounds against the pilings—a soft knocking, like something asking politely to come in.
Carter stood beside her, his bow tie undone and hanging loose around his collar, his jacket open.
He had not prepared a speech. He had not brought a ring box hidden in his pocket.
He turned to her and said, “I can’t imagine anyone I’d rather spend my life with,” and then, because the first statement demanded its conclusion, “Marry me.”
It was the voice of a man stating a fact he had discovered about himself and was now sharing with the only person who needed to know. Certain. Quiet. Unadorned.