Chapter 31: CUTTING HER OFF

MIA

I borrowed Dante's phone on the third day and called Yuna from his number because maybe she'd blocked mine by mistake, maybe if I could just hear her voice and explain that I was worried, confused and needed my best friend then everything would make sense again.

It rang twice before going to voicemail.

She'd blocked his number too.

"I'm sorry." Dante took the phone back gently. "I know this is hard."

Hard didn't even begin to cover it. It felt like someone had reached into my chest and removed my heart and now I was supposed to just keep functioning like the absence wasn't killing me. Fifteen years of friendship gone with a single text and I didn't even know why, didn't get an explanation or a conversation or a chance to fix whatever I'd done wrong.

"I don't understand what happened." I was curled on the couch where I'd spent most of the past three days because leaving the apartment meant facing a world where my best friend had decided I wasn't worth being friends with any more. "We were fine and then suddenly we weren't and I don't know what changed."

"Maybe nothing changed." He sat beside me and pulled my feet into his lap. "Maybe she was always like this and you just didn't see it."

"Like what?"

"Unstable and jealous. The kind of person who drops people when they stop serving a purpose." His thumb pressed into my ankle and I felt some of the tension ease. "Think about it. When did the distance start?"

"When I moved in with you."

"Exactly. When you got into a serious relationship and didn't need her the way you used to." He said. "She couldn't handle not being the center of your world anymore."

I wanted to argue but the words stuck in my throat because there was some truth in what he was saying. Yuna had made comments about how much time I was spending with Dante and had seemed annoyed when I canceled plans because he'd asked me to dinner. She was persistent on me leaving him from  the start.

"She didn't like you," I said slowly.

"No. She didn't. And I think that's because she saw me as competition for your attention." He kept working my foot and his voice stayed gentle. "Real friends are happy when you find someone who makes you happy. They don't try to sabotage it or make you feel guilty for building a life with someone."

"She wasn't trying to sabotage—"

"Wasn't she?" He looked at me directly. "She called you constantly when she knew we had plans. She always had some emergency that needed your immediate attention. She made you feel bad about spending time with me instead of her."

I tried to remember if that was true and found that my memories were getting fuzzy, reshaping themselves around his words. Had Yuna called during our dates? Maybe. Had she acted like my relationship was an inconvenience? I couldn't remember clearly but Dante sounded so certain and he'd been there for all of it so maybe he'd seen patterns I'd missed.

"I thought she was just protective," I said.

"There's a difference between protective and possessive. She wanted to keep you dependent on her. Keep you isolated and small so she could be the most important person in your life." He pulled me closer. "That's not friendship. That's borderline control."

The more I thought about it the more it started to make sense.

"She said it wasn't safe," I said quietly. "In her text. She said she couldn't be my friend because it wasn't safe."

"Safe for who? Her?" He shook his head. "That sounds like an excuse. It's as if she wanted to cut you off but needed it to sound dramatic instead of just admitting she was jealous of what we have."

"Maybe."

"Or maybe she's going through something and instead of reaching out for help she's pushing everyone away and blaming you for her own issues." His hand moved to my hair. "Either way, you can't fix someone who doesn't want to be fixed. You can't force friendship with someone who's decided to shut you out."

He was right and I knew because I'd tried calling from different numbers, showing up at her apartment, even sending an email that bounced back undelivered and she'd blocked every possible avenue for communication which meant she'd made her choice and I had to accept it even if accepting it felt like losing a limb.

"I just wish I knew what I did wrong," I said.

"You didn't do anything wrong. Sometimes people show you who they really are and it hurts but that doesn't mean you caused it." He tilted my face up. "You have me and you'll always have me. I'm not going anywhere."

"Promise?"

"I promise. You're not alone, Mia. You never have to be alone again."

I stopped trying to reach out after that.

Dante was right. She'd made her choice and I had to make mine and my choice was to accept that some friendships weren't meant to last no matter how much history you shared.

It got easier to believe his version of things anyway.

"She never really got me," I said one night over dinner. "Not the way you do."

"No," Dante agreed. "She didn't."

"I think she liked keeping me small and being the successful one, the put-together one, the one who had her life figured out."

"People like that need someone to feel superior to. That's why they choose friends who are struggling."

Was I struggling when Yuna and I met? I tried to remember freshman year of college and found the memories hard to hold onto and it was easier to let Dante's interpretation fill in the gaps because he saw things clearly and I was tired of trying to make sense of relationships that didn't make sense.

I found the photo by accident while looking for something else.

My old phone was backed up on my laptop and I stumbled in a folder of images Yuna had sent me over the years, scrolling through memories of coffee dates, inside jokes and lazy afternoons then one photo stopped me.

A selfie Yuna had sent maybe six months ago. She was grinning at the camera, holding up an iced coffee, standing on a street corner I recognized as being near her office. The text with it had said something about finally getting the promotion she'd been working toward.

But it wasn't Yuna I was looking at now, it was the background behind her. There was a tall man not moving like everyone else, he was just standing there, hands in his pockets looking at her.

The resolution was too low to see his face clearly when I zoomed in. Just a dark shape that seemed very familiar the more I stared but I couldn't just place it.

I zoomed in more but couldn't get his face and I spent the rest of the night wondering who he was.