Chapter 6 #2
It was a far cry from the lake house. The one with the wide windows and the dock where Derek and Meg had thlived just a year ago, before the market crash and the layoffs and the slow, grinding process of rebuilding that had landed them here, in a third-floor walk-up with a buzzer that stuck.
Savannah had helped them pack. She had stood in that empty living room with boxes labeled in Meg’s neat handwriting and watched her sister make the choice to let go of something beautiful without letting it break her.
Meg moved to the kitchen. The kettle clicked on, its electric hum filling the silence, and she reached into a cabinet for two mugs without asking if Savannah wanted tea. She already knew.
Savannah sat on the sofa. Her hands folded in her lap, her back straight, her posture holding the shape it had held at a hundred Hayes family dinners—chin level, shoulders relaxed in the way that required constant, invisible effort.
The Easter dress felt heavy against her skin now, the cashmere too warm for the overheated apartment, but she did not unzip it.
She sat with her hands in her lap and her eyes on the coffee table and she said nothing.
The kettle whistled. Meg poured water over tea bags in mugs that did not match and carried them to the sofa. She set Savannah’s on the coffee table, within reach but not pressed into her hands. She sat beside her, close enough that their shoulders nearly touched but not crowding, not forcing.
She did not say, Tell me what happened. She did not say, Start from the beginning. She sat with her mug between her palms and her eyes on the opposite wall and she waited.
Something in Savannah’s shoulders dropped.
Her breath caught once, a small hitch that she steadied immediately, her lungs filling and emptying in the measured rhythm.
Her eyes filled. The tears gathered along her lower lids and stayed there, not falling, just pooling, catching the light that made her vision blur.
Her body was still, her face composed except for the tears that would not spill, her hands flat on her thighs as if she were holding herself together through sheer force of will.
“She had her hands on his chest,” she said.
The voice of a woman reporting a fact she had already examined from every angle.
“At Easter dinner. In front of his mother, his aunts, his cousins. She straightened his tie—the one I tied for him this morning—and she adjusted his collar, and her hands stayed there. Then she called him Cart. Said she didn’t know how he managed without her. ”
Meg listened. Her mug rested on her knee, steam rising in a thin curl, and she did not interrupt.
“I told her to take her hands off my husband. Just that. And the whole room—his whole family—acted like I’d pulled a gun.
Lily cried. Actual tears. Carter went after her.
He told me I’d humiliated her. That I was the one who had ruined Easter.
Me! That I should have pulled him aside instead of making a scene.
” Savannah’s voice did not waver. It gained precision, each word sharper than the last, carving the truth out of something that had been vague and painful for too long.
“I’ve been pulling him aside for a year, Meg. A year of Sundays. A year of driving home and trying to explain what I was seeing and watching him laugh it off or tell me I was imagining things or squeeze my hand and change the subject.”
The tears spilled. Two of them, tracking clean lines down her cheeks, and she did not wipe them away. She let them fall onto the cashmere of her Easter dress, dark spots that would dry invisible because the fabric was navy and expensive and designed to hide evidence.
“He asked me what I wanted him to do. Cut Lily out entirely? As if that was the only option. As if the only choices were everything or nothing. I never asked him to cut anyone out. I asked him to see me. To stand next to me. To choose me over her. Just once.” Her voice cracked on the last word.
A small break, quickly mended, her jaw tightening as she swallowed the sound back into her chest. “He didn’t. ”
Meg set her mug on the coffee table. The ceramic made a soft click against the wood.
“She’s a bitch,” she said. “Don’t let them make you feel crazy. You know what she’s doing.”
Savannah stared at her mug. The tea had gone cold, the surface still and dark, and she looked at it as if the answer might be written there in some language she had not yet learned to read.
“It’s not that I think he wants her,” she said.
“I don’t. Not really…” She had carried the thought like a stone she could not set down, turning it over in private, examining its edges in the quiet hours when Carter slept beside her with one arm flung above his head and his breathing deep and untroubled.
“I think that’s why no one believes me. Because it doesn’t make sense.
If he wanted her, if there was something there, they would be together.
But he doesn’t. I’m sure of it. He looks at me the way a man in love looks at a woman.
I know that look. I’ve felt it.” Her hands tightened around the mug. The ceramic was cool against her palms.
“But he keeps choosing her anyway. Over and over. He stands beside her in rooms full of people who have known her since she was six years old, and he lets her have the thing—the history, the belonging, the right to touch him in ways I never would in public—and he doesn’t see that it costs me anything. He doesn’t see me at all.”
Meg nodded. A single, slow movement, her eyes on Savannah’s face, and she did not reach for the thread of hope. She did not say, He’ll come around. She did not say, Give it time. She let the truth sit between them in its full, uncomfortable weight.
Savannah reached behind her and pulled the knit blanket from the back of the sofa.
It was soft, worn thin in places, the kind of blanket that had been dragged from room to room through years of movie nights and sick days and ordinary evenings, and she wrapped it around her shoulders, pulling it close until the fabric settled against her skin.
Meg’s arm came around her. Not grabbing, not clutching—just resting there, warm and solid, her hand on Savannah’s far shoulder, and Savannah leaned into the contact the way a tired person leans into a wall.
Her head found the curve of Meg’s shoulder.
She closed her eyes, and the tears came then, silent and steady, soaking into the flannel of Meg’s sweatshirt without sound or drama.
They stayed like that, two women on a worn sofa with a blanket between them and a truth that had finally been spoken aloud.
Meg’s hand moved in slow circles against Savannah’s back. Small, steady pressure. The kind of touch that said: I am here. I am not going anywhere. Whatever comes next, you do not have to face it alone.