You Chose My Best Friend, So Why Are You Watching Your Rival Zip My Dress

Claire's POV

Ethan brought it up the next morning before I could.

He was standing at the kitchen island in his shirtsleeves, knotting his tie, a cup of coffee going cold beside his keys. I'd barely slept. He looked like he'd had a full eight hours.

"About last night," he said. "Vanessa was really out of it. Dizzy, pale. I didn't want her going up to that apartment alone and passing out in the elevator."

"So you followed her home."

"I made sure she got inside." He tugged the knot straight. "I was there ten minutes, Claire. I came back here after."

I'd heard the front door at 1:40 a.m. I didn't say that.

He watched me for a second, waiting for the argument he'd already prepared for. When it didn't come, something in his shoulders relaxed, like I'd passed a test.

"You're not going to make this a thing?"

"No," I said.

He kissed my temple on his way out. It was the kind of kiss you give someone you've stopped looking at closely.

---

Two days later, I drove to the Cole Harbor Hotel to finalize the guest room block.

The Cole Group owned the property, so it had always been the obvious choice. Eighty rooms for out-of-town guests, a welcome table in the lobby, and the penthouse suite on the twenty-second floor, which Ethan had kept on a standing reservation for three years. He used it for late nights and early meetings. When we got engaged, he'd sat me down on its sofa and said it would be ours until the house was finished. Our place before we had a place.

I'd planned the bridal breakfast there for the morning of the wedding. Pastries from the bakery on Pine, mimosas, my mother, my cousins, Vanessa as my maid of honor. I'd already sent the menu to the kitchen.

After the meeting with the events manager, I took the private elevator up. I wanted to measure the windows for the photographer's lighting.

The door was already unlocked. I could hear water running.

I stepped inside just as the bathroom door opened, and Vanessa walked out in a white hotel robe, towel-drying her hair.

She stopped. So did I.

"Claire." Her hand went to the collar of the robe and pulled it closed. "Oh my God, you scared me."

"What are you doing here?"

"I spilled an entire latte down my blouse this morning. Right before a client call." She gave a small, embarrassed laugh and nodded toward the bathroom, where a silk blouse hung dripping from the shower rod. "I didn't have time to go home. I just needed somewhere to rinse it out."

It was a reasonable story. It was almost exactly the kind of story I would have believed a week ago.

"How did you get in?"

She blinked. "What?"

"The door has a code," I said. "How do you know it?"

For a moment she didn't answer. Her eyes moved past me, toward the entry, and I heard the elevator chime before I understood why she'd looked.

Ethan walked in carrying a garment bag. He saw me and slowed, but only slightly.

"I gave it to her," he said.

He laid the garment bag across the back of a chair. A fresh blouse, I assumed. He'd gone to get her a fresh blouse.

"She's running point on the brand relaunch," he went on. "She's up here half the week getting signatures. It was easier than having her wait in the lobby every time I was stuck on a call."

"You could have mentioned it."

"It didn't seem important."

"Ethan." I kept my voice low, because Vanessa was standing right there and I refused to give her a scene. "You told me this was ours. Until the house was done. That's what you said, sitting on that couch."

His jaw tightened. "And it is. Nobody's taking it from you."

"Then why does she have the code?"

"Because she works for me." He exhaled hard through his nose. "Are you really going to keep score over a room now? The dress, the car, now a door code? Do you hear yourself?"

"I asked one question."

"You asked it like an accusation."

Vanessa moved toward the kitchenette, quiet, as if she were trying to give us privacy. She opened the refrigerator without looking and took out a glass bottle of Gerolsteiner, the sparkling mineral water Ethan drank and nothing else. The suite was stocked with it because I'd called housekeeping myself, three years ago, and asked them to keep it on the second shelf.

She uncapped it and handed it to him.

He took it without a word.

Then she glanced at his collar, frowned slightly, and walked to the closet. She didn't search. She pulled open the second drawer of the valet stand, the one where he kept spare ties folded in a leather roll, and took out the charcoal one.

"You've got coffee on yours too," she said. "Probably from me. Sorry."

He looked down at his tie, then took the new one from her hand.

I stood very still.

There was no lipstick on his collar. There was no unmade bed. Nothing I could photograph, nothing I could hold up and point to. If I accused them of anything, Ethan would call me paranoid, and he would be able to say it with a straight face.

But I knew where that tie roll was because I had bought it for him. I knew which shelf the water was on because I had put it there.

She knew too. She knew without thinking.

That wasn't something you learned in one visit.

"Claire?" Ethan was looking at me, the bottle halfway to his mouth. "Are we done?"

"Yes," I said. "We're done."

I took the elevator down to the lobby and went back to the events office. The manager looked up, surprised to see me again so soon.

"The bridal breakfast in the penthouse," I said. "I'd like to cancel it."

---

Ethan called before I was even out of the parking garage.

"You canceled the breakfast."

News traveled fast in a building he owned.

"I did."

"Vanessa just found out from the kitchen staff. She's upset. She thinks you're doing this because of her."

I sat behind the wheel with the engine off. "I'm doing it because I don't want to get married out of a room she has the key to."

"So this is about punishing her." His voice sharpened. "She spilled coffee, Claire. She borrowed a shower. And now you're cutting her out of your wedding morning in front of the hotel staff, like she did something wrong."

"I didn't cut her out of anything. I moved a breakfast."

"Don't play that game with me. You know exactly how it looks."

"How it looks," I repeated. "That's interesting, coming from you."

The line went silent. Then, flatly: "I'm not doing this right now. I have a dinner."

He hung up.

I sat there until the garage lights clicked to their evening setting.

---

The message came at 11:12 that night. I was in bed alone. Ethan's dinner was apparently running late.

Vanessa.

*Hey. I know today was awkward and I'm sorry if I overstepped. You know how much you mean to me. I just really hope you don't make Ethan choose between us.*

I read it twice.

Then I laughed, out loud, in the dark of a bedroom that had never felt so big.

Make him choose.

As if I'd been the one choosing all along. As if I'd chosen who wore my dress, who got the car, who had the code, who knew which drawer the ties were in.

He'd been making choices for weeks.

I just hadn't been one of them.