“Dang. I’m sorry.”
“Thank you. She was my . . .” Best friend, I added mentally. I needed someone after you let me go. Someone who could never say what I never wanted to hear. And she was that, and so much more. “I loved her a whole lot.” I didn’t know what to say next, so I took to my latte like a woman who’s just stumbled upon a water fountain in the middle of the desert. The coffee was basically a mirage, but even the illusion of relief was better than nothing.
“You still married?” Ben asked after a moment.
I glanced up at him, somewhat relieved that I’d posted at least one photo of Josh. “Let me guess—social media?”
He smiled again. “Yeah. How’s that going?”
I had a decision to make: keep things light—or be real. And when I looked at him, I realized that I had no interest in keeping things light. If we were going to do this, we were really going to do it: the good, the bad, and the painfully honest. “Look,” I said. “I know this is probably weird—”
“Probably not,” he said, and I cracked a smile.
“Fair enough. But I want to get this out of the way before we go any further. Why did you want to get together? Like, is this about burying the hatchet and moving on, or about us being friends? I’m not trying to get you to answer one way or the other. But before I tell you about my life now, I guess I need to know what this is.”
He ran a hand over his head and looked away for a moment. When he turned back, I saw that for as much as he’d changed, he was still the Ben I’d known . . . and adored. And something—I’ll call it hope—began to unfurl deep within me. “I mean, I’ve missed you, Laine.”
“Me, too,” I said frankly. “A lot.”
“Thanks,” he said. He was still looking at me, and it made me feel kind of naked. I forced myself not to look away. “And to your question, we obviously figured out how to get on without each other.”
He wasn’t being mean, but it still stung to hear him say this. “There wasn’t really another choice,” I said.
“Looking back? Yeah, there was. But we’re two incredibly stubborn and arguably stupid people,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “I made lots of friends over the past sixteen years, and not one of them has been you, Laine. No one wants to find the spiciest Indian restaurant in all of Jackson Heights and burn their tongue off for a full hour.”
I couldn’t help but laugh, thinking about that dinner we’d had the summer before college. My stomach hadn’t been the same for nearly a week after, but it had been worth it. Ben and I had loved trying new food—the spicier, the better—but it had been ages since I had anything remotely different from what Josh and I usually ate; his stomach was too sensitive. But also, I suppose I hadn’t wanted to think about how fun it would’ve been if Ben had been there to share the meal with me. Deep down, I knew that I compared the two of them, and I hated that. There had even been a moment when Josh proposed—a fleeting moment, but all the same—when I’d thought, No. This isn’t the man you’re supposed to spend the rest of your life with. I was attracted to him. We had fun together. He loved my dog, who’d become his dog, too. He was ambitious and kind, and he wanted to stay in Ann Arbor and start a family, or so he said at the time. But for all that, a tiny voice in me said, He doesn’t get you. Not like Ben does.
Did, I’d immediately corrected myself. And with that simple grammar shift, I was reminded that instead of comparing them, I needed to keep them in entirely different categories. When it came to Josh, close friendship was not the goal. Because a best friend? They only were until they weren’t anymore. But Josh asking to stay the course with me—through sickness and health, good times and bad. Forever.
Yet here I was. Contemplating letting that sure thing go.
“No one likes my dumb food jokes, either.” Ben smiled even more broadly. “What did one berry say to another?”
I groaned. “It’s you who got us into this jam,” I said, and we both grinned.
But then his face fell. “When my mom died . . . no one knew what that meant for me. Everyone around me—even my dad—thought I’d dealt with that loss a long time ago. But as you knew, I never really did. When I flew out to California to bury her, I kept thinking it would have been easier if I could’ve talked to you. If you’d been there with me.”
If anyone else had said this to me, I would’ve felt incredibly guilty. Then I would’ve looked for ways to make it better. But now I was just . . . sad. And I let myself sit with that. “So why didn’t you call?” I asked after a moment.
When I looked at him, I was pretty sure I saw the exact same pain he was seeing. “You left me. At least, that’s what it felt like. No,” he corrected himself. “That’s what it was. You didn’t come over after, or call, or do anything to tell me that you still cared. I felt rejected, and, Laine—regardless of whether we were going to stay friends or take things in a different direction, I never thought you of all people would reject me.”
“I’m really sorry,” I said frankly. “I never thought about how much that would hurt you. All I could think about was how hurt I was.”
“Thank you,” he said. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table. “And I’m sorry that I hurt you. I never should’ve said what I said.”
“No, if you meant it, you absolutely should have. I just wish . . . well, I wished you’d brought it up some other time. Not when we were in the middle of our one-and-only argument.”
“And that’s why you never reached out?”
“Yes,” I said. I could swear that the couple sitting at the next table was listening in. Well, let them.
He looked away briefly. When he turned back to me, sweat was forming on his brow. “I was wrong.”
“Come on, Ben. You don’t have to say something you don’t believe.”
“I’m not gonna lie—I did believe that for a long time. I couldn’t think of a single other reason why she’d tell you not to date me. But now that I know what I know, I see that I was wrong.”
“You know, it wasn’t just you that I left behind,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. “I avoided her. I moved to Ann Arbor partially to prove that I could do what my mother didn’t want me to.” I eyed him. “But what did you mean, now that you know what you know?”
He put his head in his hands for a few seconds before looking up at me. “This is really hard for me to say.”
“Okay . . .” I had no idea where he was going with this.
“Did you know your mom and my dad . . . um. That they were friends?”
That was his big reveal? “I mean, obviously,” I said. “We kind of made them be, if you think about it.”
“Did you ever notice that they stopped talking around the time we were in high school?” he said.
“Sure—probably because they didn’t need to keep an eye on us anymore.”
“But they used to sit out on the stoop and talk for hours when we were in middle school. We were totally free range at that point. And don’t you think it’s weird that my dad had a key to your parents’ place?”
What was he getting at? “I’m not following,” I admitted.
He leaned forward. “They were together, Laine.”
“No way.” The ground beneath me seemed to sway. “My parents . . . loved each other.” Was their relationship one I wanted to emulate? No. But they had loved each other.
At least I thought they had.
“That may be true, but your mom and my dad had an affair,” he said quietly.