Chapter 6
Chapter Six
The bedroom was quiet except for the soft rustle of fabric being folded into thirds.
Savannah stood at the foot of the bed with her suitcase open, her Easter dress still on, its hem slightly wrinkled from the long afternoon, and she worked with the concentration of a woman performing a task that required no thought and all of her attention.
She had removed her heels. They sat paired neatly by the closet door, the navy leather catching the low light from the bedside lamp, toes aligned perfectly, as if she had placed them there with the same care she brought to everything.
The dress she had not taken off. The zipper was still closed at the back, the cashmere warm against her skin.
The blouse she was folding was one of Carter’s favorites—the white one with the faint blue stripes. She smoothed the collar between her fingers, flattened the sleeves along their crease, and set it in the suitcase with the kind of care that felt like a form of goodbye.
The front door opened. The sound of it reached her through the apartment—the deadbolt turning, the door swinging wide, the jingle of keys—and then his footsteps in the entryway.
She did not look up. She reached for the next item on the bed—a pair of socks, rolled together—and placed it in the corner of the suitcase.
The footsteps stopped. She knew he was in the doorway before she heard his breath catch.
She could feel it—the sudden stillness, the weight of his gaze on her back, on the open suitcase, on the careful arrangement of her things on the bedspread.
The keys hit the dresser with a dull clatter that seemed to echo through the quiet apartment.
“What the hell are you doing?”
His voice was low. Taut. The voice of a man who had rehearsed his argument during the drive home and arrived home to find it was for nothing.
Savannah folded a pair of jeans along the seams. She set them in the suitcase, adjusting their position so they lay flat against the blouse.
“Savannah.”
She zipped the toiletry bag—the small navy one she used for overnight trips—and set it in the suitcase beside the jeans. The sound of the zipper filled the silence between them, a sharp, final note.
Then she turned, not fully, just enough to look at him over her shoulder. He stood in the doorway with his jacket still on, his tie loose at the collar. His face had the flushed, tight expression of a man who believed he was the injured party.
“Lily was embarrassed,” he said. The words came out clipped, each one landing with the force of something he had been carrying since he left the Hayes driveway. “You ruined Easter dinner. You overreacted. You behaved like a child.”
He said it the way someone reads a list of charges. Matter-of-fact. Unremarkable. A recitation of facts he believed were self-evident.
Savannah turned back to the suitcase. She smoothed the folded blouse with the flat of her palm, her fingers tracing the edge of the collar.
“I didn’t make a scene,” she said. Her voice was even. Measured. The voice of a woman stating a fact rather than defending a position. “The scene was already happening. I was just the first person in that room impolite enough to say so.”
Carter moved into the room. His footsteps were quick, agitated, the stride of a man who could not stand still when he was frustrated. His hand went to the back of his neck, fingers working the muscle there in the gesture she had seen a hundred times.
“You could have pulled me aside,” he said.
His voice had risen half a register, the careful control beginning to fray at the edges.
“Handled it privately. There were better ways. Christ, Savannah, you stood in the middle of my family’s Easter dinner and told Lily to take her hands off me like she was some floozy at a bar. There were kids in that room.”
Savannah turned to face him fully. She did not step away from the bed. She stood with her hands at her sides, her posture straight, the Easter dress still on her body like armor she had not yet shed. She had run out of reasons to be gentle.
“I have been telling you privately for months,” she said.
Each word distinct. Precise. “Every Sunday dinner. Every drive home. Every time I tried to explain what was happening and you laughed it off or told me I was imagining things or squeezed my hand and changed the subject. Private love means very little when you take her side in public, Carter. It means nothing.”
His jaw tightened. She watched the muscle work beneath his skin. She saw the flash of something hard and defensive, buried beneath the warmth he usually wore.
“Lily is my oldest friend.”
The statement of a man who believed this fact explained everything, absolved everything, rendered the rest of the conversation unnecessary.
“I am your wife.”
She said it quietly. Not as a rebuttal. As a fact. The kind of fact that should not need stating in your own bedroom, to the man who had stood beside you on a dock and asked you to spend your life with him.
He ran a hand through his hair. The gesture was rough, frustrated, his fingers dragging through the short strands.
“You’re asking me to choose.”
“No. You already chose.” Her voice did not break.
It did the opposite—it settled, dropping into a register so low and steady that the quiet of it filled the room more completely than any shout could have.
“Tonight. At that dinner. Every dinner before it. Every drive home where you laughed it off. Every time you told me I was imagining things when I watched her mark her territory in front of your family and you did nothing. You chose, Carter. You’ve been choosing her all along.
You just don’t like that I finally said enough. ”
He stepped toward her. One stride, quick and involuntary, his body moving to close the distance between them the way it always did when he wanted to reach her—to touch her, to hold her, to use the physical fact of his presence as a substitute for the words he could not find.
His hand came up, palm open, reaching for her arm or her face or the space between them that had grown too wide to cross with a gesture.
Savannah turned back to the suitcase. She reached for the zipper and pulled it closed with a sound that seemed, in the quiet room, final.
“What do you want me to do?” His voice cracked on the last word. The frustration had given way to something rawer—genuine bewilderment. “Cut Lily out entirely? Is that what you want? She’s been in my life since we were six years old. You can’t just?—”
“I never asked you to cut anyone out.” She lifted the suitcase off the bed.
The weight of it settled against her leg, solid and real, and she adjusted her grip on the handle.
“I asked you to see what was happening. To stand next to me when it did. To stand up for me, in front of your family, one time. Just once. You didn’t. ”
She moved toward the door. Carter’s hand went to the handle beside hers—not grabbing it, not pulling it from her grip, just resting there, his fingers warm against the cool metal, his palm open against the curve of the handle as if he could anchor her to the room through contact alone.
She looked at his hand. Then she looked at him.
His eyes were wide, dark, searching her face for something—for the crack, the yield, the moment when her composure would break and she would set the suitcase down and let him hold her and they would find their way back to the version of themselves that had existed before Lily Reynolds walked into a dining room and put her hands on his chest.
His fingers loosened. He let go.
Savannah walked out of the bedroom, through the living room, and out the front door. She pulled it closed behind her with a soft click
Meg’s building had a buzzer that stuck. Savannah pressed it three times, her finger holding the button longer each time, and on the third try the intercom crackled with a voice she recognized before the words formed.
“Come up.”
The door released with a buzz that cut off mid-tone.
Savannah shouldered it open, her suitcase rolling behind her on wheels that caught on the threshold, and the hallway greeted her with the warm, close smell of someone’s dinner—garlic and onions and something braising.
The stairs were narrow, the carpet worn to a faint path down the center, and she climbed them with the suitcase bumping against each step, the sound echoing in the empty stairwell.
She had texted Meg from the rideshare. Three sentences: I left. I’m coming to your place. I have a suitcase. Meg had texted, “Okay,” and nothing else.
The door to 3C was already open when she reached the landing.
Meg stood in the doorway in faded flannel pajama pants and a university sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed to her elbows, her hair pulled into a messy knot on top of her head, and she took one look at Savannah—the Easter dress, the suitcase, the composure that was holding by a thread so thin it was nearly invisible—and stepped aside without a word.
The apartment was small. A single main room that served as living room, dining room, and kitchen, divided by furniture rather than walls—a worn sofa with a knit blanket thrown over its back, a coffee table stacked with library books and a half-empty water glass, a kitchen counter crowded with mismatched mugs and a ceramic fruit bowl holding a single apple.
A lamp in the corner had a shade that tilted slightly to the left, casting a warm, uneven light across the hardwood floor.
Through an open doorway, Savannah could see the edge of a bed with a rumpled duvet.