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Second Best: A Novel of Friendship, Betrayal, and the Life She Chose
She thought she knew her best friend. She thought she knew her husband. She was wrong about both.
Kara Mitchell is a nurse, a mother of two, and the kind of woman who holds everything together because someone has to. Her marriage functions. Her friendships function. She is good at all of it. She does not look too closely at any of it.
Then one ordinary Sunday afternoon, she watches her husband and her best friend in her own kitchen, and she sees it — not in a text, not in a receipt, but in the practiced distance between their bodies. A hand that reaches and stops. A laugh that arrives half a beat late. The whole picture assembles the way a diagnosis quiet, complete, impossible to unsee. She says nothing. She walks Amber to the door. She calls a lawyer before she calls anyone else.
Told in dual first-person perspectives, Second Best moves in two directions at once. Kara narrates forward in present tense from discovery day through a contested divorce and a parallel investigation that threatens her nursing career at the same time her marriage collapses. In her chapters, she is always in motion, always managing, holding the shape of her family together through competence and sheer will. Amber narrates backward in past tense through the affair, the insecurity that drove it, and the private wound she has carried since childhood. Every one of Amber's chapters is shadowed by a fact the reader knows before she speaks her first Amber is already dead.
The two timelines converge at a letter found in a nightstand drawer three weeks after Amber's funeral.
As Kara navigates custody hearings, a board investigation, and the slow work of dismantling the life she built, she finds an unexpected anchor in Cole Mercer, Amber's older brother, a former soldier who came home when his family called and stayed because he could not make himself leave again. Cole does not try to fix things. He stays in the room. He reads the picture book twice without complaint. And somewhere in the steady accumulation of his presence, Kara begins to understand that she is allowed to want something for herself.
But Amber is not finished. The hang-up calls start. Then the break-ins. A restraining order is filed, then tested, then crossed. And when Amber's spiral reaches its end, Kara is left holding a letter that does not explain, does not excuse, and does not let her go.
Set in the small-town heat of Laurel Creek, South Carolina, Second Best traces the complicated love between two women who grew up in each other's families, the loyalty of the parents who chose Kara over their own children, and the question of whether a life can be built from wreckage without pretending the wreckage isn't still there.
Did she destroy me, or set me free?
The answer is both. And she is going to have to live with both.
"The couch is where it has always the long interior wall, facing the television. It was there when we moved in and it stayed there because furniture stays where you put it unless something makes you move it. I have thought about moving it before, in the way you think about small things that are slightly wrong and not wrong enough to do anything about. The couch should face the front window. I have known this for years. I did nothing about it because it was not my decision in any articulated sense; it was Derek's arrangement, or it was nobody's arrangement, or it was just the way things were, which is often the same thing."
For readers of Celeste Ng, Elizabeth Strout, and Ann Patchett. A novel about grief and gratitude in the same hand, about the difference between the life you are good at and the life you actually want, and about a woman who discovers that destruction and liberation can wear the same face.
Second Best contains mature themes including infidelity, drug overdose, and one explicit scene.
Kara Mitchell is a nurse, a mother of two, and the kind of woman who holds everything together because someone has to. Her marriage functions. Her friendships function. She is good at all of it. She does not look too closely at any of it.
Then one ordinary Sunday afternoon, she watches her husband and her best friend in her own kitchen, and she sees it — not in a text, not in a receipt, but in the practiced distance between their bodies. A hand that reaches and stops. A laugh that arrives half a beat late. The whole picture assembles the way a diagnosis quiet, complete, impossible to unsee. She says nothing. She walks Amber to the door. She calls a lawyer before she calls anyone else.
Told in dual first-person perspectives, Second Best moves in two directions at once. Kara narrates forward in present tense from discovery day through a contested divorce and a parallel investigation that threatens her nursing career at the same time her marriage collapses. In her chapters, she is always in motion, always managing, holding the shape of her family together through competence and sheer will. Amber narrates backward in past tense through the affair, the insecurity that drove it, and the private wound she has carried since childhood. Every one of Amber's chapters is shadowed by a fact the reader knows before she speaks her first Amber is already dead.
The two timelines converge at a letter found in a nightstand drawer three weeks after Amber's funeral.
As Kara navigates custody hearings, a board investigation, and the slow work of dismantling the life she built, she finds an unexpected anchor in Cole Mercer, Amber's older brother, a former soldier who came home when his family called and stayed because he could not make himself leave again. Cole does not try to fix things. He stays in the room. He reads the picture book twice without complaint. And somewhere in the steady accumulation of his presence, Kara begins to understand that she is allowed to want something for herself.
But Amber is not finished. The hang-up calls start. Then the break-ins. A restraining order is filed, then tested, then crossed. And when Amber's spiral reaches its end, Kara is left holding a letter that does not explain, does not excuse, and does not let her go.
Set in the small-town heat of Laurel Creek, South Carolina, Second Best traces the complicated love between two women who grew up in each other's families, the loyalty of the parents who chose Kara over their own children, and the question of whether a life can be built from wreckage without pretending the wreckage isn't still there.
Did she destroy me, or set me free?
The answer is both. And she is going to have to live with both.
"The couch is where it has always the long interior wall, facing the television. It was there when we moved in and it stayed there because furniture stays where you put it unless something makes you move it. I have thought about moving it before, in the way you think about small things that are slightly wrong and not wrong enough to do anything about. The couch should face the front window. I have known this for years. I did nothing about it because it was not my decision in any articulated sense; it was Derek's arrangement, or it was nobody's arrangement, or it was just the way things were, which is often the same thing."
For readers of Celeste Ng, Elizabeth Strout, and Ann Patchett. A novel about grief and gratitude in the same hand, about the difference between the life you are good at and the life you actually want, and about a woman who discovers that destruction and liberation can wear the same face.
Second Best contains mature themes including infidelity, drug overdose, and one explicit scene.
262 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 9, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
May 13, 2026
⭐️⭐️ (2.0) — “This Book Could’ve Been an Email”
I have never read a book so committed to describing emotional devastation while simultaneously refusing to let anyone actually HAVE emotions 😭
This story has all the ingredients for an absolutely feral domestic drama:
* cheating husband
* betrayal by the best friend
* collapsing marriage
* children involved
* divorce
* grief
* obsession
* emotional affairs
* new romance
And somehow… none of it has any actual emotional friction.
The husband especially became unintentionally hilarious to me because after one single confrontation, he basically vanishes into another dimension.
I am not exaggerating.
He finds out she filed for divorce, shows up angry, pushes his way onto the property demanding answers, the police tell him to leave… and then this man emotionally exits the chat forever. No fighting for the marriage. No attempts to see the children. No custody battle. No mediation scenes. No desperate texts. No manipulation. No emotional fallout. He basically goes:
“What are you doing???”
…and then wanders barefoot into the Carolina fog never to be heard from again 😭
And that emotional flatness infects the entire book.
Nobody reacts to anything with the level of emotion the situation actually deserves. The new love interest Cole is kind and stable, but so low-key that the romance barely creates a pulse. The grief feels muted. The cheating fallout feels muted. The divorce feels muted. Everyone speaks in the same calm, restrained emotional register no matter what’s happening.
Reading this felt like:
Bueller. Bueller. Bueller.
Just an endless stream of subdued emotional observations delivered at the exact same volume for 262 pages.
Ironically, the most interesting part of the book ended up being Amber’s psychology. She spends the entire novel desperately trying to convince herself she was finally chosen first instead of second-best to Kara, and it becomes painfully clear that she builds entire emotional conclusions out of the tiniest scraps of attention.
The affair itself isn’t fueled by some huge obsessive love story. Half the things the husband says to her are incredibly vague and emotionally noncommittal, but Amber interprets every breadcrumb like it’s sacred scripture. A simple:
“I think about you when I’m not with you”
becomes, in her mind:
“This man is hopelessly consumed by me.”
Meanwhile I’m sitting there like:
Girl… this man could’ve said “I brushed my hair in your bathroom” and you would’ve treated it like evidence of eternal devotion 😭
That aspect of the story — the insecurity, projection, and lifelong feeling of being second-best — was actually fascinating. I just wish the book had leaned harder into the emotional messiness of it instead of presenting everything from such a distant, emotionally padded perspective.
And honestly? The blurb already tells you almost everything important anyway — including information the novel itself treats like a gradual reveal. So if you fully read the blurb beforehand, you spend a huge portion of the book waiting for the characters to catch up to information you already know.
The frustrating thing is that the writing itself is perfectly readable. This isn’t bad prose. It’s just a story that constantly describes emotions instead of fully dramatizing them. I kept waiting for some huge emotional detonation that would justify all the restraint and slow simmering — some explosive confrontation, messy breakdown, custody fight, confession, SOMETHING.
Honestly, the only reason I kept reading toward the end was because I was convinced either:
1. the aliens were eventually going to return the missing husband to Earth, or
2. the book was building toward some massive dramatic climax that would suddenly make the emotional flatline make sense.
But no. The emotional tone stays almost completely monotone from beginning to end. There’s never really a true high point, escalation, or payoff moment where the story fully cashes in all the tension it spent 262 pages quietly describing.
Instead I finished the book feeling like I had attended a very calm lecture about a much messier and more interesting story happening somewhere offscreen while the actual characters sat politely in the background regulating their emotions.
I have never read a book so committed to describing emotional devastation while simultaneously refusing to let anyone actually HAVE emotions 😭
This story has all the ingredients for an absolutely feral domestic drama:
* cheating husband
* betrayal by the best friend
* collapsing marriage
* children involved
* divorce
* grief
* obsession
* emotional affairs
* new romance
And somehow… none of it has any actual emotional friction.
The husband especially became unintentionally hilarious to me because after one single confrontation, he basically vanishes into another dimension.
I am not exaggerating.
He finds out she filed for divorce, shows up angry, pushes his way onto the property demanding answers, the police tell him to leave… and then this man emotionally exits the chat forever. No fighting for the marriage. No attempts to see the children. No custody battle. No mediation scenes. No desperate texts. No manipulation. No emotional fallout. He basically goes:
“What are you doing???”
…and then wanders barefoot into the Carolina fog never to be heard from again 😭
And that emotional flatness infects the entire book.
Nobody reacts to anything with the level of emotion the situation actually deserves. The new love interest Cole is kind and stable, but so low-key that the romance barely creates a pulse. The grief feels muted. The cheating fallout feels muted. The divorce feels muted. Everyone speaks in the same calm, restrained emotional register no matter what’s happening.
Reading this felt like:
Bueller. Bueller. Bueller.
Just an endless stream of subdued emotional observations delivered at the exact same volume for 262 pages.
Ironically, the most interesting part of the book ended up being Amber’s psychology. She spends the entire novel desperately trying to convince herself she was finally chosen first instead of second-best to Kara, and it becomes painfully clear that she builds entire emotional conclusions out of the tiniest scraps of attention.
The affair itself isn’t fueled by some huge obsessive love story. Half the things the husband says to her are incredibly vague and emotionally noncommittal, but Amber interprets every breadcrumb like it’s sacred scripture. A simple:
“I think about you when I’m not with you”
becomes, in her mind:
“This man is hopelessly consumed by me.”
Meanwhile I’m sitting there like:
Girl… this man could’ve said “I brushed my hair in your bathroom” and you would’ve treated it like evidence of eternal devotion 😭
That aspect of the story — the insecurity, projection, and lifelong feeling of being second-best — was actually fascinating. I just wish the book had leaned harder into the emotional messiness of it instead of presenting everything from such a distant, emotionally padded perspective.
And honestly? The blurb already tells you almost everything important anyway — including information the novel itself treats like a gradual reveal. So if you fully read the blurb beforehand, you spend a huge portion of the book waiting for the characters to catch up to information you already know.
The frustrating thing is that the writing itself is perfectly readable. This isn’t bad prose. It’s just a story that constantly describes emotions instead of fully dramatizing them. I kept waiting for some huge emotional detonation that would justify all the restraint and slow simmering — some explosive confrontation, messy breakdown, custody fight, confession, SOMETHING.
Honestly, the only reason I kept reading toward the end was because I was convinced either:
1. the aliens were eventually going to return the missing husband to Earth, or
2. the book was building toward some massive dramatic climax that would suddenly make the emotional flatline make sense.
But no. The emotional tone stays almost completely monotone from beginning to end. There’s never really a true high point, escalation, or payoff moment where the story fully cashes in all the tension it spent 262 pages quietly describing.
Instead I finished the book feeling like I had attended a very calm lecture about a much messier and more interesting story happening somewhere offscreen while the actual characters sat politely in the background regulating their emotions.
May 21, 2026
Don’t bother
At the beginning I was hopeful but holy cow was it a whole lot of nothing. No emotion. Lots of little nothings in between the very few pertinent sentences. The best friend is jealous bc guys happens to glance and smile at the FMC when she walks in a room. Yeah…paranoid much? The affair wasn’t addressed at all. The husband just disappears. The best friend idk what the heck happened to her. She wrote a letter to the FMC put it in her own nightstand drawer and….??? Just nothing. I skimmed and just skipped to the end of this whole lot of nothing. What a waste. Ugh.
At the beginning I was hopeful but holy cow was it a whole lot of nothing. No emotion. Lots of little nothings in between the very few pertinent sentences. The best friend is jealous bc guys happens to glance and smile at the FMC when she walks in a room. Yeah…paranoid much? The affair wasn’t addressed at all. The husband just disappears. The best friend idk what the heck happened to her. She wrote a letter to the FMC put it in her own nightstand drawer and….??? Just nothing. I skimmed and just skipped to the end of this whole lot of nothing. What a waste. Ugh.
April 28, 2026
Good bones, not enough info
I really wanted to give this book a better rating. It started out good but then it kind of fell apart. There’s a lot of information I feel that’s missing to really tie everything together. Some of it just was repetitive writing some of it just felt like a I was the one writing the book.
I think the author should’ve done a little bit more explaining about the husband and his lack of care about his kids. Not sure if it’s his first book but a little bit more details would’ve made this book a lot better.
I really wanted to give this book a better rating. It started out good but then it kind of fell apart. There’s a lot of information I feel that’s missing to really tie everything together. Some of it just was repetitive writing some of it just felt like a I was the one writing the book.
I think the author should’ve done a little bit more explaining about the husband and his lack of care about his kids. Not sure if it’s his first book but a little bit more details would’ve made this book a lot better.
May 21, 2026
Reads Like AI- no emotion, little dialogue
This story is a run on of statements, very little dialogue. It does not describe any emotions. We never find out anyones feelings or motivation for the affair. We never get the joy of reading about her husband’s reaction to being caught. There isn’t a confrontation between her and her husband. Or her and her ex best friend. Don’t try to wait for it to get better- it does not. Reads like AI.
This story is a run on of statements, very little dialogue. It does not describe any emotions. We never find out anyones feelings or motivation for the affair. We never get the joy of reading about her husband’s reaction to being caught. There isn’t a confrontation between her and her husband. Or her and her ex best friend. Don’t try to wait for it to get better- it does not. Reads like AI.
May 6, 2026
it’s so confused
I wish there was more detail I guess. The relationship with Derek and amber? Derek what happened to him? He just evaporated?
It’s almost like an abrupt writing.
Weird read
I wish there was more detail I guess. The relationship with Derek and amber? Derek what happened to him? He just evaporated?
It’s almost like an abrupt writing.
Weird read
May 14, 2026
Read like a written version of Flat Stanley. Cheating, divorce, life long friendships, betrayals galore, new romance, workplace trials, and suicide and still read like Flat Stanley.
May 15, 2026
So confused
This book was so confusing. It was a waste of a read. Why do authors repeat so much. The ending was way out there
This book was so confusing. It was a waste of a read. Why do authors repeat so much. The ending was way out there
May 24, 2026
The MFC was devoid of emotions.
May 24, 2026
boring!
It just went on and on with inner dialogue and little else. It was more about her best friend, her husband wasn’t even in any of it.
It just went on and on with inner dialogue and little else. It was more about her best friend, her husband wasn’t even in any of it.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews