My legs stop moving before my brain finishes the calculation.
"MAE?!"
The name erupts from my throat with the volume and subtlety of a fire alarm going off in a library. The woman at the end of the corridor freezes mid-step, her shoulders rising with the instinctive tension of someone who has just been addressed at a decibel level reserved for emergencies and stadium announcements.
She turns.
And thirteen years collapse into the space between her face and mine like an accordion being compressed by a fist.
Mabeline Mae Rose.
The recognition is instantaneous and total, bypassing the conscious processing center of my brain entirely and detonating in the emotional core where memories live unfiltered and unprotected by the rational editing my adult mind has learned to apply. I do not see the woman in front of me first. I see the girl. The girl with the frizzy hair and the oversized glasses and the braces that glinted when she smiled and the habit of making herself small in crowded rooms because she had been taught through repetition that her size was the least inconvenient version of her existence.
The girl who held my hand on the first day of kindergarten because I was six years old and terrified and she was six years old and brave enough for both of us.
Who split her lunch with me every day for a month straight when my mother "forgot" to pack mine, which was Eleanora's passive-aggressive method of teaching me that hunger was a motivational tool and skipping meals built character.
Who stood between me and every bully who found my tomboy presentation worthy of commentary, her tiny frame planted like a wall between their cruelty and my vulnerability, fists raised, eyes blazing, absolutely zero fear in a body that weighed approximately sixty pounds soaking wet.
The girl I abandoned.
The guilt hits like a crosscheck to the sternum. Not new guilt. Old guilt. The kind that has been composting in the pit of my stomach for eight years, fermenting into a rancid, permanent ache that surfaces every time I think about what happened and the role I played in it.
Because Jace got an explanation.
Jace, whose parents orbited the same social galaxy as mine, whose family's proximity made complete severance logistically impossible, got the luxury of a whispered confession during a holiday gathering two years after my disappearance. A rushed, tear-soaked explanation in the corner of a ballroom while our mothers circulated with champagne and our fathers discussed quarterly projections. I told him everything. Mother's decision. The forced school transfer. The confiscated phone. The systematic dismantling of every connection I had built outside of Eleanora's curated social circle.
Jace understood. Jace forgave. Jace maintained the thread of our friendship through the gaps because his access to my world was never fully severed, just restricted.
Mae got none of that.
Mae got silence. Mae got the brutal, unadorned experience of a best friend who was there on Friday and gone by Monday, with no forwarding address, no explanation, no whispered confession at a holiday party because Mabeline Mae Rose did not exist in Eleanora Ashford-Holloway's curated social circle and therefore did not warrant the courtesy of a goodbye.
I did that to her.
Not willingly. Not by choice. I was sixteen and powerless and trapped in a custody arrangement that gave my mother the legal authority to restructure my education, relocate my schooling, and confiscate every communication device I owned on the grounds that "social distractions were impeding my development as a young Omega of standing." I fought. Iscreamed. I threw a chair through my bedroom window, which resulted in a week of grounding and a bill for the glass that my father paid without commentary because Rick Holloway rarely put his foot down to the extent of making things harder for Mother.
Which was its own kind of betrayal.
The quiet kind. The kind committed by good men who love you but choose peace over protection because the cost of confrontation with Eleanora is higher than the cost of watching their daughter lose everything that matters to her.
Dad never fought hard enough. Not for my friendships. Not for my hockey. Not for the parts of me that my mother found inconvenient and systematically pruned like a gardener removing branches that grew in unapproved directions.
And I was the collateral. Every single time.
But the reasons do not matter right now.
The reasons will not undo eight years of silence. Will not repair the damage of a disappearance that was, from Mae's perspective, indistinguishable from abandonment. Will not erase the specific, intimate pain of being left by someone who promised to stay.
And she is standing right there.
Taller than I remember. Slimmer. Her hair is different, chestnut waves instead of the frizzy curls she battled throughout childhood, pulled into that signature ponytail with the twist at the end that tells me she never stopped being the meticulous, detail-oriented girl who organized her pencil case by color and practiced figure skating sequences in her bedroom until her downstairs neighbors complained about the thumping.
Her eyes are the same. Hazel, warm, carrying that particular blend of intelligence and vulnerability that used to make me want to shield her from every sharp edge the world threw in her direction.
She is looking at me like she has seen a ghost.
Fair. Accurate. You are a ghost, Sage. You are the ghost of a friendship she buried because you gave her no choice.
