“I’ve been patient.” The whiskey was talking now, allowing me to say things I’d spent years keeping inside. “I’ve been so—” I stopped. Let out a short breath. “God, Becca. I’ve been so patient.”
She went still.
I looked at her—really looked, the way I only let myself do when I thought she wasn’t paying attention. Brown eyes, dark hair, the stubborn set of her mouth that meant she was bracingfor something. She’d been my best friend since we were little kids. But she’d been something I didn’t have a word for when it was too late for me to do anything about it. And I’d spent fifteen years being careful, being good, being the person she could count on in a way that never asked anything back.
The pavement was cold when my knee hit it.
From somewhere behind me, I heard Harper make a small, sharp sound—not quite a gasp, not quite a word. Then silence. The kind of silence of someone who has decided not to interfere.
“Marry me,” I said. “I’ll make you happy. I swear it.” It came out low, rough, and embarrassingly earnest.
Becca stared at me. One heartbeat, two. Something moved through her eyes that I was going to spend a long time trying to define.
“Say yes!” Bella’s voice rang out across the lot, clear and certain. “Say yes, Becca!”
“Bella,” Harper hissed.
“But she should say yes!”
“I know, baby. Shh.”
Becca’s expression cracked, and I couldn’t tell if it was a laugh trying to escape or something else entirely. Then she smiled, the kind of smile that meantnowithout saying it.
“Come on,” she said softly.
She reached down and took my arm. “Let’s get you home.”
I let her pull me up. I didn’t say anything else. There wasn’t anything else to say—or there was; there was so much more, but the moment had passed, and I was sober enough to know it. Sober enough to know, already, what I’d done.
She drove me to her place because she was Becca; she was kind, and that was what she did—she took care of people even when they didn’t deserve it. She made me drink a glass of water and steered me toward her bed with the patient efficiency of someone who was good at managing disasters.
I was mostly asleep before my head hit the pillow. I heard her settle onto the couch, and in the morning, she was gone, and I was a wreck.
Here was the thing I couldn’t drink away, argue with, or reframe. She hadn’t done anything wrong. She’d ended a relationship that wasn’t working and walked out to her car alone in a parking lot at night, and I had followed her out and made it about me. She’d been through something hard, and I’d made it harder. I’d chosen the worst possible moment—drunk, in a parking lot, while she was in the middle of grieving a different ending—and some part of me had probably known that. Had known she wouldn’t say yes, not like that. Had known I was choosing a moment where I could claim I’d tried without having to sit with the risk of actually trying. That was the part that sat in my chest like a stone all the way home. Not the rejection. The cowardice underneath the gesture.
She’d left a glass of water on the nightstand and a travel pack of Tylenol beside it.
I took both before I left.
I knew she wouldn’t mention it, and I probably wouldn’t either. We were good at that—the careful quiet. Along with the things that lived in the space between us. Things that neither of us had found the right words for yet.
Harper would mention it. Most likely repeatedly. But that was Harper’s prerogative, and I knew she would exercise it with enthusiasm.
I told myself it would be fine.
Even though I knew it wouldn’t.
The cold came off the mountain in long, slow waves, and I walked into it with my hands shoved deep in my pockets and my eyes on the pavement. Sweetbriar was empty at this hour, just the sound of my boots and the occasional car passing on thehighway. I had nothing to do but think, which was the last thing I needed.
She hadn’t said yes. That was the fact I kept turning over, not because I didn’t understand it—I understood it completely, which was the worst part—but because I couldn’t figure out what to do with it. You spend fifteen years carrying around feelings that heavy, and then you drop them in a parking lot, drunk, in front of her best friend and a seven-year-old, and the answer is,come on, let’s get you home.The answer is water, Tylenol, and the couch, and gone before I woke up.
What had I expected? What had I actually expected?
The honest answer was nothing. I hadn’t expected anything. That was the part I couldn’t stop dwelling on—the small, shameful truth that I’d knelt in that parking lot knowing she’d say no. Knowing the moment was wrong. Knowing I was handing her something she’d have to be kind about, and Becca was always kind, and I’d let that be enough of a safety net. A real ask would have required a real answer. A real answer might have been no in a way that meant no forever, sober and clear-eyed and final, and I hadn’t been ready for that. I still wasn’t.
So I’d done it drunk, at the worst possible time, in a way she could gently set aside and never mention again.
God, I was such a coward.
