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Jin:Insert eye roll here.
Me:I just got invited to a “family dinner.” Pretty sure she’ll be there. Game plan?
Jin:Uh, be a normal human being.
Me:Right. Will attempt. What’s up in MD? How are the pint-size humans you live with?
Jin:They’re fucking monsters. Never have children unless you want your soul owned.
Me:You love it.
Jin:Yeah, I do. Rebecca woke me up this morning at five by peeling back my eyelids. When I asked her why, she said it was because she loved me so much, she couldn’t go another minute without seeing me. I mean, fuck, she’s three, where did she learn such masterful manipulation?
Me:Pretty sure her older sister had something to do with it. Didn’t Kayla talk you into buying her a new dollhouse after she purposely broke the first one by sitting in it?
Jin:Oh, right. Yeah, I’m raising a pair of demons. I blame their mother.
Me:Pretty sure Erin would blame you.
Jin:You doing okay? I mean for real, for real.
Me:Fuck, I don’t know. I’ve barely seen her over the past two days. A big part of me wants to talk to her. But I don’t want to fuck things up—for either of us.
Jin:I think you two could use a talk.
Me:Did she say she wanted to talk?!?!
Jin:Ha! You’re not going to get me to spill. It’s been thirteen years, have I broken once?
Me:I’m going to tell your wife you’re the very worst.
Jin:She knows. She loves me anyway. Call me or text me or whatever if you get dark. You don’t have to be okay. You can be fucked up or weirded out or whatever.
Me:Yeah, I’ll call you in a couple days either way. Thanks, man. Give those babies a kiss from Uncle Jude.
I tuckedmy phone back in my pocket, smiling to myself. Jin was the only one I’d stayed in touch with from Never Again, probably because he’d left the band after the first album, before shit really hit the fan. He’d gone back and finished the degree he’d been working on before music got in the way and became a school psychologist.
To an outsider, it might’ve seemed strange this goofy guy ended up in what was a pretty important job, but to people who really knew him, it wasn’t a surprise. Jin liked his weed back in the day, but that hadn’t been his defining characteristic, at least not to me. He was the one who looked out for us, in his own way. After Ben died and Tali left, he was the only one who could summon even a hint of a smile from me. The bastard worked hard at it too.
He’d also taken it upon himself not to let Tali go. He’d been the one to forge a friendship with her outside of me. Completely outside of me. He didn’t even tell me they were still in contact until years later, after I’d gotten clean. That wasallhe ever told me. He wouldn’t even tell me if she was happy or in a relationship, or Jesus, what state she lived in. I’d accepted it, but I guessed I also liked knowing she and I were still connected through him, even if we never spoke again.
Which I’d also accepted years ago.
But now...now I wondered. Closure was an illusion, but maybe we could get the peace we hadn’t back then? All I knew was, it’d been thirteen years since I’d let go of Natalia DiPietro, ten years since I’d last touched her, five years since she was in the same room as me, and I’d never felt less at peace with any of it.
