Page 132 of Vegas with my Ex’s Best Friends

Ethan shakes Connor's hand at the kitchen doorway. “Connor. Good to see you.” He takes the cider. “I'll get these in the fridge.”

We sit. Liam opens wine. Andrew takes the seat directly across from Connor—no ambiguity. I sit beside Connor out of reflex. Old habit.

Small talk first. Connor asks about the neighborhood, the commute, how we found the house. Practical questions, because practical questions don't require feelings. Ethan answers most of them with clean, specific detail. It's almost funny watching them fall into the same rhythm they have at the office—Connor asking, Ethan answering, neither of them wasting words. Connor's shoulders drop about half an inch.

Sarah asks about the nursery.

“I'll show you after dinner,” I say. “You have to see the yellow.”

“What yellow?”

“Liam's yellow,” Andrew says.

Sarah looks at Liam.

“I made a bold choice,” Liam says, completely unrepentant. He reaches over and refills my water glass without looking at it, still watching Andrew. “The nursery needed energy.”

“You painted it the color of a yield sign,” Ethan says from the kitchen.

“Children respond well to high-contrast environments. It's developmental.”

“You read one article,” Andrew says.

“I read the headline of one article.” Liam sets the water down and presses a quick kiss to the side of my head on his way back to his seat. Not performed. Just reflex. “That's how science works.”

Sarah laughs. Connor is watching Liam the way he watches people he already knows do something he didn't expect.

Ethan serves dinner with the same focused precision he brings to everything else. He tracks who has what. He notices Sarah's glass before she does. He puts food on my plate without asking what I want, because at this point he knows my order of preference. It's just what Ethan does when he cares about something—turns it into a system.

Andrew watches. He's watching Connor watch all of it, which I notice without drawing attention to.

About forty minutes in, I stand to grab more bread and my balance does the thing—nothing dramatic, just a half-step to recalibrate, one hand on the table edge. Andrew is already up. On his feet and beside me with a hand at my elbow before I've fully registered what happened.

“I've got it,” he says, taking the bread basket.

“I'm fine.”

“I know.”

He goes back to his seat. Ethan, from the other end of the table: “Sit down. I'll get whatever you need.” Liam is already up, refilling my glass—but he does it while making a joke to Sarah about something else entirely, and by the time he sits back down the table has moved on.

Connor hasn't moved on.

He's quiet for a beat. Long enough that Sarah notices.

“That wasn't planned?” he asks, low. Not quite to me. “They didn't—there wasn't a signal?”

“There never is,” I say.

He looks at his wine glass. “They just—”

“Yeah,” I say. “They do.”

Sarah puts her hand on his forearm briefly, and something in him releases.

The table talk moves on. Sarah asks Liam something about work and he answers in a lengthy embellished rant. His version of the story keeps getting bigger. By the third embellishment she's laughing so hard she has to put her fork down.

“None of that happened,” Andrew says.