Free Nearlyweds by Beth Kendrick Page A

western front?”
    “He’s going to the Y to play basketball with his friends!” Casey could not have looked more distraught if her husband had just confessed to cheating on her with STD-riddled porn stars. “He knew I was planning a reconciliation dinner, and he blows me off to go shoot hoops with his buddies?”
    “Men,” Erin said with disgust.
    “But…” I furrowed my brow. “You said you weren’t mad.”
    “Ix-nay on the ontradiction-cay,” Erin murmured, but she was too late.
    Casey refocused all her rage in my direction. “Stella. How old are you?”
    I stared at the floor. “Twenty-four.”
    “I’ve got five years on you in real time, and about a billion in life experiences. I’ll let you in on a little secret to successful relationships—don’t blurt out every feeling you have the second you have it.”
    The smug big-sister act was wearing really thin. I flipped my hair and mimicked her tone. “Lying? That’s your key to a happy marriage?”
    “Not lying,” she corrected. “Delayed reaction. Choosing your battles. You have to decide which hills you want to defend. I myself prefer not to die on the hill of chicken and rosemary potatoes.”
    “And I prefer not to die on the hill of pound puppies and half-eaten leather sofas.”
    She finally cracked a smile.
    “Oh, and the dog has a name now,” I told her. “Cash. As in Johnny.”
    “I like it,” Erin said.
    “Me, too.” Casey crossed the store and flipped the sign on the front door from Open to Closed. When she turned back toward us, her anger had been replaced with what seemed like defeat or resignation. “Listen, do either of you want to come up to the apartment and have dinner? I’ve got a lot of free-range chicken to unload.”
     
    “…so we spend a week in Italy, have a fantastic time, and come home completely jet-lagged. I was ready to sleep for a week.” Erin paused for a sip of chilled white wine. We had gathered around Casey’s antique dining room table (“I tossed Nick’s IKEA particleboard eyesore the second we got engaged”) while she served up perfectly prepared chicken with fresh sprigs of rosemary on elegant ecru china plates (also antique). Between the intricate lace tablecloth, the white taper candles, and the subtly scented cranberry wreath hanging above the sideboard, the whole room could have been transported directly out of Better Homes and Gardens .
    “You guys went to Italy for your honeymoon?” Casey sighed wistfully. “You are so lucky. Between paying for the wedding and renegotiating my lease for the store, we could only afford a weekend in the Adirondacks.”
    “Don’t feel bad,” I consoled. “Mark and I went to a bed-and-breakfast in Vermont.”
    “Yeah, but I bet it was a five-star hotel with a personal valet to run your baths and peel you grapes.”
    “Uh…” She had me there. Mark had picked the Cartwell House Inn because we were both sick of the long flights to Europe and wanted to go someplace nearby to de-stress after the wedding. He and I had already been to London, Paris, Tuscany, New Zealand, and, of course, the fateful trip to Bermuda; we’d figured that we’d go low-key for the honeymoon. “There might have been a truffle or two on the pillow each night.”
    “Anyway.” Erin dinged her wineglass with her dessert spoon to reclaim our attention. “We come home from the honeymoon, utterly bedraggled after six hours crammed into those tiny airplane seats, we open the door to the house, and his mom is sitting in the living room waiting for us!”
    “How’d she get in?” I asked.
    “I still don’t know. David claims he never gave her a key, so either she stole his and had a copy made without his knowledge or he gave her a copy and doesn’t have the guts to admit it. I’m not sure which scenario is scarier. But she’s waiting for us in the living room, and she’s cleaned. The whole house. We had just moved in a week before the wedding, so we hadn’t had time to do