“She’s new here as your brother’swife, which means she’s new here as mydaughter-in-lawand yoursister-in-law. Some manners, please.”
Those words were like a giant boulder landing in my stomach with all the subtlety of a grenade. I was someone’swife…someone’sdaughter-in-law. I was a lot of someones’sister-in-law.
I was aliar.
“Afraid manners are a lost cause with that shithead, Mom.” Lincoln bent to kiss Holly on the cheek.
“That’s a dollar in the swear jar, Uncle Linc!” Emma called from the living room, not even glancing away from Xander’s tiara, which she adjusted with the seriousness of a royal coronation.
“I thought it was fifty cents?” Lincoln yelled back.
“Not anymore,” Emma said. “Infration!”
Lincoln snorted. “Inflation, you mean?”
“That’s what I said.” Emma’sduhcame through loud and clear.
“Oh Jesus,” Lincoln muttered. Then louder, “Stop letting her spend so much time with Laurel, Xan! The teenage snark is brushing off on my little bean.”
“Better than the overgrown frat-boy vibes she gets from you,” Laurel muttered without even looking up.
“Hey,” Lincoln said, offended. “I’m a married man now, thank you very much.”
“I think you have me and our bet to thank for that.” Sutton smirked at him over the rim of her wineglass, her brow raised.
“What bet?” I asked, splitting a glance between the two.
“We made a bet, and if I lost, she told me I had to delete my dating apps.”
“And you did lose. Spectacularly,” she said. “Good thing, too. You’d been missing what’s been in front of you all along.”
Lincoln glanced down at me, his eyes soft, lips curved up in that half grin I hated to love. “Guess I just needed to wait for the right moment to catch her.”
It was a line. That was all it was—just a line because we were putting on a show for his family. Foreveryone.
But my stomach hadn’t gotten that message. It flipped over itself, unable to tell the truth from a lie. Something it’d been having a difficult time with more and more lately.
Lincoln settled his hand on the small of my back and guided me to the table. Then he sat down next to me, his arm going to the back of my chair and brushing his thumb softly against my shoulder like it was the most natural thing in the world.
And that was the problem—itfeltnatural.
Too natural for something that was made up entirely of lies.
Dinner unfoldedthe way I would expect in a family with four rowdy boys—now men. It was all loud voices, second helpings, overlapping stories, and at least three arguments over who grilled the best burger.
Through it all, Lincoln kept touching me—a hand on my knee, his fingers brushing mine, his arm resting on the back of my chair while he played with the end of my braid.
It was all so easy.Tooeasy. The kind of easy that made the lie simple to forget.
And the worst part was, it worked.
The longer I sat there, surrounded by warmth and commotion and people who egged one another on but clearly loved one another without question, the harder it became to remember this was fake.
Nothing more than a temporary fix dressed up as forever.
I was still trying to come to terms with that when a sudden scrape cut through the noise—metal against glass, aggressive and not at all subtle. Atlas was digging into a jar of my jam, scraping the bottom of it like a man starved.
Chloe stared at him in horror. “You ate itall?”
