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The cab smelled like pine freshener and old leather.

Eva watched Sunbeam Street come into view through the window and felt the specific feeling of a place that had existed in your memory for so long that the real version always looks slightly wrong - too small, or too ordinary, or missing whatever quality the memory had quietly added over time.

Sunbeam Street looked exactly the same. That was the problem.

Same old oaks, same porches, same particular quality of quiet that belonged only to streets where people had lived long enough to stop noticing each other. The jewellery shop and bakery on Main would have the same faded signage. The bus station would have the same broken overhead light that nobody had ever bothered to fix.

Two years. She had built an entirely different life in two years, and Sunbeam Street had simply continued being itself, unbothered, waiting.

Then she saw the house.

She had the cab driver stop at the corner.

Something made her want to approach on foot. To give herself the walk - twenty meters of old oak and familiar pavement and the specific sound of her own footsteps on a street she'd known since before she was tall enough to reach the doorbell.

The house looked wrong.

Not different. That was what stopped her at the gate. Nothing had changed - and yet everything had been made to look better than it was. The brick freshly painted, the white trim sharp enough to sting, the copper gutters scrubbed until they gleamed. The roses on the trellis arranged like they were posing for something. The garden beds edged too precisely, too carefully, in a way her mother had never bothered about before.

And music. Strings, low and careful, drifting from inside.

Eva stood at the gate and looked at her family home and felt the first small wrong note land in her chest. Not alarm. Just - off. Like a word that sounds fine until you look at the spelling.

She pressed the doorbell.

Rena opened the door.

Her expression cycled from shock to delight in half a second - pulled Eva into a hug before she'd finished stepping inside - and Eva laughed and hugged her back and felt the wrong note quiet slightly. This was her sister. This was home. She was being nervous about nothing.

"You're here! How long are you staying? Does Blaise know-"

"It's a surprise." Eva pulled back, grinning. "Where is everyone? Why does the house look like it's been on a television programme? Are you having a party?"

"Rena!" A voice from upstairs. "Who's at the door?"

Footsteps on the stairs - quick, urgent - and Tess appeared on the landing and stopped so sharply she had to grab the banister.

The colour left her face.

Eva's smile stayed in place. "Hello, Tess. You look like you've seen a ghost. It's me. I do still exist."

Tess came down the remaining stairs slowly. Too slowly. "What are you doing here, Eva?"

"Surprising my fiancé, hopefully. Unless he's not here yet - I thought I'd come to the house first, say hello properly." She looked between them. Both of them standing with the particular stillness of people trying very hard to look normal. "What's going on? Why are you both dressed up?"

"It's nothing-" Tess started.

"Dad said never to return," Rena said.

Eva's eyes moved to her. Stayed there. She didn't say anything. She didn't need to - Rena had the grace to look at the floor.

"That's not-" Tess stepped forward quickly. "That's not what this is. We just didn't know you were coming."

"Obviously. It's a surprise." Eva looked around the room again. The flowers she hadn't noticed walking in. The extra chairs. The particular quality of a house cleaned for guests, not for living in. "Seriously though. What's going on?"

"Please don't say anything," Tess said to Rena. Low and urgent and not quite low enough.

"Don't say anything about what?" Eva looked between them. "And who moved my things? Who's been sleeping in my room? There are different bags up there."

"Eva-"

"Don't tell Eva what, Tess?"

The room went quiet.

Tess looked at her. Her eyes were filling - carefully, the way eyes fill when someone has been holding something for a long time and the holding is almost done.

She reached out and took Eva's left hand. Gently. Turned it over, held it up - showing Rena the small ring on Eva's own finger. The one Blaise had put there in her kitchen a year ago. The one she wore every single day.

Rena's hand flew to her mouth.

"I'm still waiting," Eva said. She pulled her hand back and crossed her arms over her chest.

Tess turned to her, tears falling now. "I am so sorry. I should have told you. I should have found a way. You are both my best friends and I didn't know how - I couldn't choose, and so I just-" She stopped. Pressed her lips together. "Please forgive me."

"Told me what." Eva's voice was very even. "Say it, Tess."

Tess said it.

"Camille is getting married. Right now, as we speak." A breath. "To Blaise Theodore Vaughn."

Eva stared at the wall behind them for a few seconds.

Then she laughed.

A full laugh - breathless, real, the kind that filled the room and bounced off the walls. She pressed a hand to her chest. "Oh, Tess. Your sense of humour is one of the few things I genuinely missed about this town." She shook her head, wiping the corner of her eye. "My fiancé and my best friend. Getting married. That's - you had me going. Honestly, for a second there-"

Neither of them laughed.

Eva looked between them. Smile still fixed. "Why aren't you laughing?"

She waved it off. "You know what this reminds me of - the Jennifer thing, junior high, remember? You told me she was all over Blaise and I stormed onto that football field like-"

Something was pressed into her hand.

She stopped.

Looked down.

A white card. Edged in gold. Names and a date written by hand in careful gold script - unhurried, like whoever had written it had taken their time and even meant every stroke. Beautiful in the way only something made with real intention could be.

But it was the signature at the bottom that stopped her breathing.

She would have recognised it anywhere. It had started with a women's magazine - their first year in junior high, the two of them bent over a glossy page, completely taken by some woman's perfect sweeping signature. They had decided on the spot they needed signatures of their own. Eva had come up with hers first, then helped Camille craft hers from scratch, and they had practised until both felt as natural as writing their own names.

She had known that signature longer than she had known most things.

Longer than she had known heartbreak.

Longer than she had known that the people you trust most are sometimes the ones who learn exactly where to aim.

The laughter died.

The card was real. The gold script was real. The date was today.

She moved toward the door.

"Eva-" Tess caught her arm. "Please. Not like this. You don't have to-"

"My best friend is getting married." Her voice was perfectly steady. "As a good friend, I should be there."

Rena was already picking up her keys.

"Who walked her down the aisle?" Eva asked.

The town moved past the car window. Her voice had the particular flatness of someone who had not yet let themselves feel the full shape of what had happened.

Tess kept her eyes on the road. "Your dad."

A pause.

"And how long has she been sleeping in my room?"

"Eva, please-"

"Just answer it."

"A few days after you left."

Eva nodded once. Turned back to the window. Said nothing.

They drove the rest of the way without speaking.

She arrived late.

The ceremony was already over, the heavy oak doors thrown open, sound and people spilling out onto the steps. She wasn't sure what she had come to do. The only thing she knew was that she had to see it with her own eyes to believe it was real.

Guests clustered in small groups across the courtyard, heads turning toward the entrance. The air smelled of stone warmed by late afternoon sun and the faint trace of gardenia from someone's bouquet.

She didn't push through. She stayed near the edge of the steps where she can see without being seen.

Then the doors opened wider.

He walked out first, and the late afternoon light caught the deep navy of his suit and turned it almost blue-black. Clean cut, tailored to him in a way that made his shoulders look broader, his stride steadier. The burgundy tie at his throat burned like a smouldering ember, pulling out the gold and green in his hazel eyes.

He had grown. That was the first thing that hit her.

The last time she had laid eyes on him he had found her - turned up at her door like he had never once stopped looking, because of course he had. He knew her like the back of his hand. She had been equal parts relieved and furious.

"You took so long," she had said, somewhere between a sob and an accusation.

"I know," he had said simply. "I'm sorry."

He had knelt down that same day, voice steady even though his hands weren't. She had bawled her eyes out the entire time she was saying yes, crying into his chest, soaking his shirt.

"Why aren't you mad at me? I left you. I didn't come find you."

"Oh, love," he had said, patting her curls. "I could never hate you."

She had cried some more after that.

He hadn't been this tall then. Hadn't filled out this way. A year had quietly turned him into someone who looked like the answer to a question she hadn't finished asking. The shoulders, the steadiness, the way he moved through a crowd like he owned the ground under his feet - all of it new, and all of it still unmistakably him.

She almost didn't see Camille.

Almost.

She came through the door on his arm - a sleek ivory column dress, simple and precise, nothing wasted. No veil. Just her face, bare and bright, turned up toward him. She looked like she had been made for exactly this moment.

She looked beautiful.

The word landed in Eva's chest like a stone.

They paused when they saw her.

Her. Standing openly at the edge of the crowd. Not hidden. Not pretending she hadn't come.

Camille's smile faltered first. The colour left her face in a single second - pure shock, then something closer to terror - her hand tightening on his arm like she was bracing for impact. Her eyes moved between them, wide and measuring, tallying the history she couldn't undo.

Blaise went still.

He looked like a man who had made his choice and was only now understanding what it had cost him. The love was still there - she could see it, she had always been able to read him - but it sat alongside something heavier now. Something that had no clean name.

Their eyes met for a second.

Eva stepped forward through the gap the guests had left, leaned in and kissed Camille once on the cheek - quick, controlled, the most dignified thing she had ever done - then turned and walked away.

She felt the urge to look back.

So she did.

Her mother was rushing forward to embrace Camille, kissing her cheek, her hair, both hands cupping her face. All the warmth she had ever wanted from that woman, given freely and without condition - to someone else.

Shouldn't she have run to me? I am her child. That woman who just married my fiancé is my best friend.

Something had broken today. She could feel the exact shape of it - not the love, the love was still there, sitting quiet and useless in her chest - but the version of the future she had carried all the way here on an early morning flight. That was what was gone.

She wiped her face quickly with the back of her hand and got into Tess's car.

The house was full by the time they got back.

Guests drifting in through the front, voices rising in every room, the particular sound of a celebration settling into itself. Her room wasn't hers. Every space had been claimed.

She needed somewhere to breathe.

She slipped through the back door.

And stopped.

She had expected tables and chairs and too much food. She had not expected this.

Under the old oaks, fairy lights drifted between the branches like caught fireflies, looping in loose generous arcs. Long tables stretched across the grass, set with mismatched china and white roses in crystal vases - the scent of gardenia drifting low in the evening air. Someone had picked each bloom by hand. You could see it in the way the petals sat open and easy, not forced. A small wooden dance floor gleamed against the grass, waiting. Chairs pulled out in clusters, arranged for conversations people hadn't started yet.

The whole space felt intentional. Thoughtful down to the last detail - the kind of thing that only happens when someone cares too much to leave anything to chance.

The strings from inside spilled out into the garden like an invitation.

A sound escaped her throat before she could stop it. Small. Barely anything.

She knew this backyard. She had described this exact scene - these lights, these roses, this dance floor - lying on a blanket under these same oaks during outdoor sleepovers, the three of them trading ideas for their perfect weddings the way girls their age always did. She had said fairy lights and real flowers and mismatched china because she liked the idea of things that didn't quite match finding a way to belong together.

Camille had been lying right beside her when she said it.

Eva moved through it slowly, trailing her fingers along the edge of a table, over the back of a chair, barely touching. Half of her needed to feel that it was real. The other half was not ready to know.

This wasn't a coincidence. This wasn't Camille forgetting, or not knowing, or thinking it wouldn't matter.

Camille had remembered every detail.

And built it anyway.

She didn't go looking for a fight.

Old habit. She went to the kitchen because it was where her family gathered, and some part of her - the part that had survived the church and the backyard and was still, stubbornly, reaching - moved toward them without thinking. The way it always had. The way it probably always would, even now. Even after today.

That was the thing about hope. It didn't ask permission.

Iris was already there, heels off, leaning against the counter with a glass of something, still in her wedding guest dress. She looked up when Eva walked in. No warmth. No surprise. Just that particular flattening of expression - the slight tightening around the eyes, the barely perceptible exhale - that Eva had spent twenty-two years learning to read. The recalibration. The silent assessment of how much energy this was going to cost her.

Then she looked back at her glass.

Rena was perched on the counter beside her, swinging her legs, scrolling through her phone. Fresh-faced, unbothered, wrapped in the easy comfort of someone the world had never once made feel unwelcome. She glanced up, gave Eva the small smile that didn't quite reach her eyes, and went back to her screen.

That was it. That was the greeting.

Their mother came in behind Eva and moved immediately to the sink - back half-turned, filling a glass with water she didn't need - and when she turned around the careful smile was already in place. The one reserved for situations she didn't want to deal with directly. The one that meant: let's all be reasonable. Let's all be calm. Let's all pretend this is something we can manage if we just speak quietly enough.

"Honey." Soft. Concerned. The particular tone of someone who needed a room to feel normal more than they needed their daughter to be alright.

Eva looked at her mother.

She looked at the careful smile and the glass of water and the way her body had gone to the sink before it turned toward her. She looked at Iris examining the middle distance. At Rena's thumb moving across her screen, patient and unbothered.

She had been at a bus station all night.

She had sat on that cold bench from the moment her father closed the door in her face until the morning light came up and the first buses began to run and she had finally, finally understood that nobody was going to come. She had watched every pair of headlights that turned onto that street. She had told herself - someone will come. Someone will call. Someone will think, wait, this is Eva, this doesn't make sense, let's hear her side.

She had gone to Tess's first. Stood on that doorstep in the dark and knocked. Tess's mother had answered with a face that told Eva everything before a word was said - we know, we've been told, I'm sorry, you can't come in here. The door had closed gently. Kindly, even. Which had somehow been worse than if it had slammed.

She had tried Blaise's. He wasn't home. She'd left three voicemails, voice breaking on every one of them, standing outside his building in the cold. He hadn't called back.

And so she had gone to the bus station and she had waited.

She had told herself he just hadn't heard his phone. That he was on his way. That her family needed time to cool down, that tomorrow they would call, that this was all something that could still be explained and fixed and survived.

She had believed that until she didn't. Until the sun came up and the street filled with ordinary people living ordinary lives and she sat on that bench with her bag between her feet and understood, fully and finally, that she had been waiting for something that was not coming.

She had never let herself wonder, in the two years since, why Tess's mother had known. Why Blaise hadn't called back. She had filed those questions away in the place she put things she wasn't ready for. She had done what she always did - she had kept moving. Built something. Become someone.

But she was standing in her family's kitchen now and the filing cabinet was full and she was twenty-two years old and she had just watched her best friend get married in her backyard under her fairy lights wearing her grandmother's necklace, and her mother was asking her how she was holding up.

"Fine," Eva said.

"Good." Her mother nodded, relieved, already half-turning back toward the room. "I think it's best if we just let things settle. It's been a lovely day. Everyone is-"

"She's wearing Grandma's necklace."

Her mother stopped.

"The one the will specified was mine," Eva said. Her voice was even. She had decided, somewhere between the backyard and this room, that she was going to say the things she had always not said. She didn't know what she expected from it. She only knew she was done not saying them. "Camille is wearing it in the photographs. I'd like to understand how that happened."

"She needed something for the wedding," her mother said. Carefully. The tone of someone rationing information. "Something borrowed. It was just - it was the closest thing."

"It was left to me," Eva said.

"I know, but-"

"By name," Eva said. "In writing."

"Eva." Iris set her glass down. "Don't make this into something."

"Into what?"

"Into one of your things." Said with the patient exhaustion of someone who had been managing Eva's things for decades. "Today has been a beautiful day. Camille looked gorgeous. Blaise looked happy. Can you not, for once, just-"

"I came home to surprise my fiancé," Eva said.

"And that," Iris said, straightening, "is exactly the kind of thing I mean. Who does that? Who shows up without a word, no warning, no-"

"I thought he'd be happy to see me."

"That's not the point-"

"What is the point, Iris?"

"The point is that you have always done things like this." Arms folded now, voice warming into the register Eva knew best - the one that meant a lesson was coming, delivered with love, which meant she was expected to receive it with gratitude. "You act on impulse and then you're surprised when it goes wrong. You don't think. You never think. And then when there are consequences you act like the world has done something to you, when really you've just-"

"Made a mess," Eva said. "I know. You've been telling me that since I was nine."

"Because it's true."

"Iris," their mother said.

"No." Iris looked at Eva with the particular expression of someone who believed absolutely that honesty was a form of love, that saying the hard thing was a gift, that someone had to be willing to tell Eva the truth and it might as well be her. "She needs to hear it. She has always needed to hear it. That's the problem - everyone tioptops around Eva because she's sensitive, because she'll take it badly, and so nobody ever actually tells her-"

"That she's a thief?" Eva said.

The kitchen went quiet.

"I'm not-" Iris stopped. Reset. "Nobody is saying that."

"Dad said it." Eva looked at her mother. "The night he told me to go. He said it and you were standing right there." She watched her mother's face do the careful thing it did - the micro-adjustment, the smoothing over - and felt something move in her chest. "You've never said that wasn't what happened."

Her mother put her glass down. "Your father was upset. He said things in the heat of-"

"He said I was a thief and he told me to get out of his house and you stood there," Eva said. "And then you didn't call. For two years, you didn't call."

"Eva, we didn't know where you-"

"Blaise found me," Eva said. "Within a year. With no help. He just - looked, and found me. Because he wanted to." She held her mother's gaze. "You had my number, Mum. You've always had my number."

The silence that followed had a different quality to it. Not the silence of people who had nothing to say. The silence of people who had things to say and were deciding whether to.

Rena, quietly, put her phone down.

"You're not entirely blameless in all of this," her mother said. Finally. Gently. The most careful version of the thing she'd been deciding. "What you did - with the money - that was a serious thing, Eva. Your father built that business. We all felt it. You have to understand that we were hurt too."

"Yes," Eva said. "You were."

"And Camille-" Her mother paused. Steadied herself. "Camille has had such a hard life. She lost her parents. She had nowhere to go. We couldn't just-"

"I'm not asking you to have turned her away," Eva said. "I never said that." She looked at her mother - at this woman who had packed her lunches and plaited her hair and sat with her through fevers and had, somewhere along the way, learned to look at her with that specific careful expression, the one that was never quite all the way warm. "I'm asking why you gave her my room. Out of four others. I'm asking why nobody told me. I'm asking why, when I was at a bus station all night - all night, Mum - you didn't come."

"We thought it was best to give you space to-"

"I was twenty years old," Eva said. "I had nowhere to go."

Her mother's mouth opened. Closed.

"I went to Tess's," Eva said. "Her mother turned me away. I went to Blaise's. He wasn't home." She said it plainly. Not for sympathy. Just because she had decided to stop pretending none of it had happened. "I sat at the bus station until morning. And I kept thinking - they'll come. They're my family. Whatever they think I did, I'm still theirs. They'll come."

The room was very still.

"I wasn't perfect," Eva said quietly. "I made mistakes. The money was wrong." Her voice remained even. It cost her something to keep it that way, and she spent that cost deliberately, one word at a time, because she had decided they did not get to see what this was doing to her. "But I was your daughter before I was any of the other things. I was your daughter first."

Her mother's eyes filled.

"You are our daughter," she said. "You've always been our daughter-"

"Then act like it," Eva said.

Not loudly. Not with anger. The quietest she had said anything in this room all evening, which was somehow the most devastating register of all.

Her mother pressed her lips together. Looked away.

And then Iris said - quietly, half to herself, with the weary sincerity of someone who genuinely meant it as comfort - "Eva, sweetheart. You've always made things so hard for yourself. If you could just learn to let things go the way Camille does - she never holds onto things like this. She just moves forward. It's one of the things we've always-"

She stopped.

Not because anyone interrupted her.

Because she looked at Eva's face.

Something had happened to it. Not a collapse - nothing cracked, nothing crumbled. It was more like the opposite. Like something behind Eva's eyes had simply - gone still. Completely still. The way a room goes still when a sound you've been hearing for so long you stopped noticing it suddenly stops.

The way Camille does.

One of the things we've always.

Eva stood there for a moment in the warmth of her family's kitchen and felt the last of something - the last filament of the thing she had been holding onto through the bus station and the year away and the voicemails and the ring and all of it - go quiet.

She had spent twenty-two years trying to be enough for these people. She had tried in every way she knew how. She had apologised and improved and shrunk herself and argued and explained and come home and stood in this room again today after everything, still reaching - still, God help her, still hoping that this time they would just-

The way Camille does.

She understood now.

It wasn't that she had failed to be what they needed. It was that what they needed was someone who wasn't her. Someone easier. Someone who let things go and moved forward and didn't ask hard questions and didn't feel everything so visibly and didn't take up the particular kind of space that Eva had always, apparently, taken up.

They didn't want Eva differently. They wanted different.

And Camille - Camille who had been lying on a blanket in this backyard describing these fairy lights - had known exactly what she was walking into when she came here. Had known exactly what Eva had been trying to get from these people. Had come in and given it to them effortlessly: the gratitude, the softness, the easy warmth of someone who moved through their house like she'd always been meant to be there.

Which meant Eva never had been.

That was the thing she had never let herself know. That was what two years of building and moving and not-looking-back had been protecting her from understanding.

She had never been meant to be here.

She picked up her bag.

"Eva-" Her mother reached toward her.

"I hope you're happy," Eva said. She meant it. That was the thing - she looked at her mother and she meant it completely, without bitterness, without the performance of someone trying to seem like the bigger person. Just - genuinely. Tiredly. Done. "I hope this house is full of everything you wanted it to be full of." She moved toward the door. "I'm sorry I was never quite right for it."

At the door she stopped.

"Tell dad-" She started. Then stood there for a moment, perfectly still, looking at the floor.

Then she shook her head.

"Never mind," she said.

She walked out.

Behind her, the kitchen was silent.

Iris was looking at the place Eva had been standing with the expression of someone replaying what they had just said and beginning, slowly, to understand what it had cost.

Rena sat on the counter with her phone face-down in her lap.

Their mother stood at the table with one hand still reaching toward a door that had already closed, and said nothing, and did not move for a long time.

She heard him before she saw him.

"Eva. Eva, wait."

She kept walking. Bag over her shoulder, eyes forward, the gravel crunching under her feet. The kitchen had taken everything she had and she had set it down, finally, and she was not picking any of it back up today.

His hand caught her arm gently. Not grabbing. Just - there. The way it always was.

She stopped. Didn't turn around.

"Please." His voice was low. Just for her. "Just let me explain. That's all I'm asking."

A long moment. The evening air had cooled. Behind her, the party was starting properly - music, voices, the sound of a celebration that had nothing to do with her.

She turned around.

He looked the way she felt. Like someone who had been holding something very heavy for a very long time and had no idea how to put it down. His tie was slightly loosened now, the burgundy catching the last of the light. He was looking at her the way he always had - like she was something he was trying to memorise.

She hated that she still recognised it.

"You didn't know I was coming," she said. Not a question. A statement. She needed him to know she understood that much. "I didn't tell you. I wanted to surprise you."

Something moved across his face. Pain. The specific kind that comes from being known too well by someone you've wronged.

"Eva-"

"Don't." She held up a hand. "I'm not doing this to punish you. I know you didn't know I was on a plane. I know you didn't plan this." She looked at him steadily. "That's the only reason I'm still standing here."

He exhaled. Long and slow.

"I need you to know-"

"I know you love me." She said it plainly. Without bitterness. "I've never doubted that. Not once. Even today. Even standing in that courtyard watching you come through those doors." She stopped. "That's actually the part that's hardest to make sense of."

"Then let me-"

"I left you a voicemail." It came out quietly. From somewhere deeper than the conversation they were having - from two years ago, from a bus station, from a girl who stood in the dark and called the one person she needed and got nothing. "The night I left. You didn't pick up and I just - I needed you to know I hadn't disappeared on purpose." She stopped herself. Felt the old wound sit alongside the new one. Two different hurts, same person. "It doesn't matter now."

"I never got-"

"Blaise." She said his name the way she always had. Two syllables, no wasted breath. "I know we worked through what happened when I left. I know we said everything we needed to say. I know we moved past it." She looked at him. Really looked. "But this." The word Camille sat between them like something physical. "Of all the people in the world."

She stopped herself.

All the questions she actually needed answered. All the things she wasn't ready to hear the truth about yet.

She shook her head.

"Not today." Very quiet. "Whatever you need to say and whatever I need to hear - it deserves more than a car park on the worst day of my life." She picked up her bag. "So not today."

His jaw tightened. She could see him holding something back. Something large.

"I never stopped-"

"Don't." Soft. Final. "Please don't say that to me today."

A long beat of silence.

She kept walking.

Camille was standing a few feet away, half in shadow, watching. The diamonds at her throat caught the last of the evening light.

Eva walked past her without breaking stride. Without a word. Without a glance.

Some things didn't need a response. Some people didn't either.

Tess was waiting by the car. Eva got in and closed the door.

The car was quiet for a long time.

Tess drove with the careful deliberateness of someone trying to give a person space and not fall apart herself simultaneously.

Eva watched the town pass through the window. The familiar streets sliding by one after another - the bakery, the old school, the corner where she and Camille used to sit on summer evenings doing nothing in particular and calling it everything. All of it shrinking in the side mirror. All of it becoming smaller and further and finally gone.

She turned to face forward.

"You knew." She said it quietly. Not looking at Tess. Just putting it in the car between them where it needed to be. "The planning. The backyard. All of it. And you said nothing."

Tess's hands tightened on the wheel. "Eva-"

"I'm not asking you to explain it right now." She kept her voice even. "I remember what she called in. I remember what we both promised her that night." A pause. "I just need you to know that I know. That I'm not sitting here thinking you had nothing to do with it."

"I couldn't go through with it." Tess's voice was barely holding. "The wedding. I got as far as the car park and I just - I couldn't walk in. I came back to the house instead." She swallowed. "I know that doesn't fix anything."

"No." Simply. "It doesn't."

"I'm so sorry, Eva. I am so-"

"Not today." Not cruel. Just tired. "I can't hear it today."

Tess nodded. Said nothing. Wiped the corner of her eye quickly the way people do when they're trying not to make their grief about themselves.

At the airport Tess pulled up to the kerb and put the car in park. Neither of them moved for a moment.

"Are we going to be okay?" Tess asked it quietly. Like she already knew the answer might not be yes and was asking anyway.

Eva looked at her. At the face that had been one of the only constants in her life for years. At the eyes that were red at the rims and trying very hard to hold it together.

"I don't know yet," she said honestly. "Ask me when I'm ready to answer that."

Tess nodded. Swallowed.

Eva got out of the car, pulled her bag from the back seat and stood on the kerb. Then she leaned back through the open door.

"You showed up today," she said. Simply. "I won't forget that."

She straightened and walked into the airport.

She didn't sleep on the way home. She just watched the town disappear through the window, street by street, until there was nothing left of it she recognised.

Then she faced forward.

The girl who had boarded a plane that morning with a ring on her finger and a surprise planned and the warm certainty of someone who had never yet been properly betrayed did not get off at the other end.

Someone else did.

Someone who had learned, in the space of one long terrible day, that the bus station doesn't lie. Nobody comes. And the only person you can ever really count on to show up - is yourself.

❖ ❖ ❖