“You knew?” I ask.
Livia says nothing.
“Livia.” The name comes out harder than I intend.
She lifts both hands, frustrated. “Of course I knew. Not from either of you, obviously. My best friends barely tell me anything about their lives anymore.”
My breath catches. “How?”
“Dane went to see Rhys a few weeks ago.”
The street seems to shift under me. “Did Rhys tell him?”
“No. Rhys stepped away to use the bathroom. Dane picked up his phone to send you a picture, and your thread was open. There hadn’t been a message between you in months. Rhys had also written you this long apology. Dane saw enough to put it together.”
“So he read it.” The words taste bitter.
“He didn’t mean to. And he didn’t read the whole thing. Just enough to understand.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Livia fires back. “You hid Rhys from me for months. Bianca has been backing out of plans, and Rhys wasn’t even coming this weekend until I persuaded him, and—”
“Wait.” I close my eyes and shake my head. It can’t be true.
But it is.
“Was this what the whole trip was for?” I open my eyes. My chest feels too tight. “All of it?”
Livia squares her shoulders.
I replay the moments when she found excuses to leave Rhys and me alone, and the moments when she made sure we weren’t. Even on the drive from Sea-Tac, she had the music blaring and the windows down. If I’d tried to tell her about the breakup, she could have claimed she never heard me.
Anger rises fast. “The nostalgia tour, the bathroom with no door—was this whole week some kind of setup?”
“A setup?” Livia says. “Mara, we were trying to help. You and Rhys belong together.”
“How could you put us through this?” My voice trembles. “You made us work around you all week. You kept pushing. Why?”
Her eyes flash, but she says nothing.
“We didn’t know,” someone says quietly.
Bianca has caught up with us. The Hound & Thistle sign lays a stripe of warm light across her face. “We didn’t know you and Rhys had broken up,” she says. “We didn’t know the whole week had been arranged around that.”
“It wasn’t a trick,” Livia says. “We were trying to help them.”
“Help us do what?” I ask.
“Get back together.”
“If we wanted to be together, we would be.”
“Come on, Mara. You’re losing the person you love because you can’t choose. You couldn’t even settle on a wedding date.”
The words hit hard. “We’re apart because we can’t make each other happy, Livia. Wanting it badly doesn’t change that.”
“Really? Dane saw what Rhys wrote. It sounds like you let your life carry you along instead of fighting for what you want.”
“You don’t get to make that decision for her,” Bianca says. “Good intentions don’t undo what you did. You knew how much I dreaded this week. You knew why Rhys nearly stayed away. You arranged everything anyway and expected us to fall in line.”
“I did what I had to,” Livia says. “I’m always the one making an effort. If I waited for everyone else, we’d never see one another. I send the first text, make the calls, leave the messages, plan the trips. When someone cancels, I suggest another date. When nobody can answer, I’m the one who checks in again.”
“We have lives outside this group,” Bianca says. “We can’t keep dropping everything to act like we’re still in college.”
I see Livia absorb that. Her expression tightens.
My anger remains, but it gives way to fear: this could get worse. Someone could leave. I might not be able to stop it.
“Can we all take a breath?” I say.
Bianca looks directly at me. “I’m not angry. I’m done pretending.”
“Pretending what?” Livia asks.
“That nothing has changed. That we’re still as close as we were years ago. We aren’t. We’ve changed.”
“Bianca,” I say, almost a whisper.
“Our lives don’t fit together the way they used to. Our schedules are different, and we don’t want to spend our free time doing the same things. Rhys lives on the coast. You’ve kept us at a distance, Mara. You and Dane still want every night to become a party. But real things are happening in our lives, and we don’t talk about them.”
“I didn’t shut you out. Rhys and I kept this from you because it hurt too much to say. I still can’t think about it without feeling like I might fall apart.”
Bianca’s eyes shine. “We should be the people you can tell. Instead, you disappeared. And when things are hard for us, what are we supposed to do?”
“Don’t pretend you’ve done everything right,” Livia says. “You’ve avoided me for months. I’m the only one trying to keep this group together. The rest of you would be fine if we never saw each other.”
“We’ve been together all week,” Bianca says. “Only now are we learning this was meant to push Mara and Rhys back together. We had days to be honest, and we weren’t. You’d rather spend five hours doing what we used to do than ask what we want now. We’re not in the same place. We’re growing up.”
Her voice catches. “We’re growing in different directions. There are things we can’t talk about with each other anymore. Maybe we’ve all been fighting that, pretending not to notice. But we should accept it. We aren’t what we used to be to one another, and that can be okay.”
“That’s okay?” Livia asks, her voice thin.
“Things are changing. They’ve already changed. I’ve never gone along with something I didn’t want just to keep the peace, but you keep deciding everything on your terms.”
“No one’s making you stay,” Livia says. “If you want to leave, leave.”
Bianca looks down at a little fern growing between the cracks beside her sandal. “Fine. Jules and I can find a room for tonight.”
Livia gives a short, cold laugh. “And then what? You’re going to end our friendship on purpose?”
“I need some space.”
“You won’t find anywhere to stay along this coast.”
Bianca presses her lips together. “Then we’ll use the guesthouse tonight.”
“And after that?”
“I don’t know yet. Maybe we’ll go.”
I don’t know what to say. I can’t tell whether I want to argue. My head aches. Nothing feels right.
At last, Livia says, “I’ll get the car.” She turns and walks back the way we came.
I look toward the harbor. Jules, Rhys, and Dane are still there, rigid silhouettes beneath the lights. They heard everything.
Part of me is relieved we finally said what we’d been holding back.
Still, I wish I could take it all back. I would do anything to return to the place we made for ourselves this week, where the rest of our lives couldn’t reach us.