My throat tightened. “Diane?—”
“Let me finish.” She held up a hand. “I’m not saying this to make you feel guilty. I’m saying it because I want you to hear something, and I want you to remember it when you’re in New York and you’re busy and it’s been three weeks since you called.”
She looked at me with an intensity that reminded me, absurdly, of Patricia.
“Distance doesn’t scare me,” she said. “Not with you. You can move to New York or London or the moon, and I will still be your person. I will still be the one you call when you’re scared or sad or when Jack does something stupid that you need to complain about. I will show up. That’s what I do. That’s what I’ve always done.”
She pointed the fork at me. “But you have to show up too. You have to call me back. You have to tell me when things are hard, not just when they’re good. You have to let me be your friend, Maggie, not just someone you used to live with.”
I couldn’t speak. My eyes were burning.
In my first life, this was exactly what had happened. I’d gotten the career, the apartment, the carefully constructed success, and I’d let Diane fade into the background like wallpaper. Hadn’t called. Hadn’t visited. Hadn’t done any of the small, essential things that keep a friendship alive. By the time I was forty, she was a Christmas card. By fifty, she was a memory.
And now she was sitting across from me in a bathrobe, telling me the exact thing I needed to hear—the thing that might save us from the slow erosion I’d already lived through once.
“I promise,” I said. My voice was rough. “I promise I won’t disappear on you.”
“Pinky swear?”
“Are we twelve?”
“Pinky swear. This is legally binding in the state of Massachusetts.”
I hooked my pinky around hers. “I, Maggie Shaw, do solemnly swear to call my best friend at least once a week, visit at least once a month?—”
“Once a month is ambitious.”
“—once every two months, and never, under any circumstances, let distance turn us into people who saywe should really catch up sometimeand then never do.”
“Acceptable.” She squeezed my pinky hard enough to hurt. “And if you break this oath, I’m coming to New York and I’m moving into your apartment and I’m never leaving.”
“Promise?”
“Threat.”
“Same thing.”
She laughed—a real laugh, the kind that crinkled her whole face—and then she was crying, and then I was crying, and we sat there at the kitchen table with cold pancakes between us, two best friends who were about to be separated by two hundred miles and absolutely nothing else.
I ate my breakfast. And for the first time in longer than I could remember, I didn’t feel like I was running from anything.
I felt like I was finally running toward it.
“We’re going out tonight,”Diane announced, emerging from the bathroom in a towel with her hair wrapped in a second towel, looking like a terry-cloth sculpture. “The four of us.”
“The four of us?”
“You, Jack, me, Robbie.” She said it like she was reading a grocery list. “It’s Valentine’s Day. I refuse to let you spend it eating burnt chicken in a studio apartment.”
“The chicken was only slightly burnt.”
“You told me it had the texture of a legal brief.”
“That was last time. He’s improving.”
“Maggie.” She put both hands on my shoulders. “It’s Valentine’s Day. Your first real Valentine’s Day with the man you love. You’re going out. You’re eating food that was prepared by someone with a working knowledge of heat. And you’re doing it with your best friend and her incredibly attractive boyfriend, because I want to meet Jack properly and Robbie’s been dying to meet the guy I never shut up about.”
“You never shut up about Jack?”
