There's a pause then.
"Jake would've loved this," Ollie says quietly.
My chest tightens. The air in the room feels thinner.
"Yeah," I manage, voice steady even as something inside me fractures. "He would've."
It still hits me sometimes—how much Jake missed. Ollie's wedding. The baby. All the ordinary miracles that come after surviving your twenties.
He should be here for this. He should be the one giving Ollie shit about becoming a dad, making jokes about diaper changesand sleepless nights. Jake never got the chance. Monty took that from him. From all of us.
The memory is sharp, uninvited. The gunshot. The hospital lights—fluorescent and unforgiving. Machines keeping time while my brother faded, each beep measuring out the seconds of a life ending too soon.
Me trapped in a fentanyl-induced coma, watching it happen over and over like a film I couldn't shut off, couldn't escape, couldn't rewrite no matter how many times I lived through it.
Rehab taught me how to sleep again. Eventually. It taught me that loud noises don't mean danger anymore—even if my body still flinches before my brain catches up, even if the echo of that gunshot never fully leaves.
"I also need to tell you something," Ollie says, pulling me back from the edge of that memory.
His voice shifts, careful now.
"There's a chance Nora might show up."
The room spins. Just slightly. Just enough that I notice my hand gripping the edge of the desk a little tighter.
"To the baby shower," he adds. "Have you, uh, spoken to her since the wedding?"
"No," I say. Too quickly. The word comes out harder than I intend. "That was the last time."
Five years. Five years since I saw her across a crowded reception, laughing at something her then boyfriend, Liam, said. Five years since I realized walking away hadn't made it hurt any less.
"I wish you'd told her, man."
"It was too late anyway." The words taste like ash.
There's a beat. Then Ollie exhales slowly, the sound weighted with something I can't quite name.
"Then it wasn't. Now it is."
I don't understand at first. Not really. The words don't process, don't compute, don't arrange themselves into meaning.
"She's getting married."
The words don't land right away. They hover. Weightless. Wrong.
My mouth opens. Nothing comes out.
My mind scrambles for some response, for anything that makes sense of what he just said.
"Nate?" Ollie says. "You there?"
I don't answer. Can't answer.
Because something inside me just broke—clean and quiet and final. Not a crack. Not a fracture. A complete severing of something I didn't know I was still holding onto until it was gone.
Seven years of telling myself it was temporary. Necessary. A sacrifice with an expiration date.
Seven years of believing that someday, somehow, when the timing was right and I'd survived long enough, fixed enough of myself, there might be a chance to undo what I'd done.
