“I don’t know what to tell you,” I say, trying my best to envision our history from his perspective. “I remember working more than usual that year, saving up for—”
I cut myself off before I say the wordsdown payment, because even in this moment, I am not cruel enough to kick Matteo where it hurts when his own Blair wounds are this fresh.
“And my phone,” I go on, “you know how it is out here. You were the only person I ever texted, or hung out with when I wasn’t on a trek, other than Blair.”
My words hang between us.
They echo in my head, stark and lonely.
I think of Matteo’s giant smile—the one he wears around everyone else these days, the one that’s always drawn huge circles of friends to his side, effortlessly.
My own circle, by contrast, has never been large. I’m a quality-over-quantity guy, and would rather go deep with just one or two people than have countless people who don’t know me at all. Maybe all this time I’ve been treating “only” and “best” as the same thing, never realizing that I didn’t rank as highly on Matteo’s hierarchy of friends.
He wasmybest friend. But that doesn’t mean I was still his…or that I ever was in the first place.
Everything’s unraveling. I’ve lost the thread of how we got here. I try to follow it back, but I’m hung up on the knot ofWe weren’t as close then as you make it sound.
But we were. I know we were.
I’ve never been a high-maintenance friend, and neither has he. Sure, maybe I was gone more than usual in that last year, but we always picked up right where we left off—our talks might have been infrequent, but they were still deep, and the furthest thing from guarded.
We talked about his family in Italy.
We talked about his dreams for the future.
We talked about the things we both loved and despised and craved.
He’s one of the few people I’ve ever cried in front of—the night my parents announced their divorce. He cried, too. He was that much a part of our family.
Never, not once, did he give any indication that he was unsatisfied with how much I was bringing to the friendship. I’ll be the first to admit I treat my phone like an afterthought, but I’ve always been like that, and last I checked, it works both ways—it’s not like he was blowing up my texts, and it’s not like I was blowing him off. I always wrote back even if it wasn’t immediately.
It’s unsettling to think I could have read thingsthiswrong. Do we just have different ideas of what being a friendis—or has the gigantic rift between us blurred his memories of how tight we actually were?
Maybe he rememberstoowell. Maybe the truth simply hurts.
The clarity hits so suddenly it’s almost physical: I’m pretty sure this is textbook gaslighting. And I suspect it isn’t just meant to make me feel worse—he’s trying to make himself feelbetter, to ease his conscience.
How many days did he spend repeating it in his head beforewe weren’t closebecame reality for him, rewritten?
If he convinces himself we weren’t best friends, that means he’s off the hook forbetrayinghis best friend. From that warped lens, what he did becomes lessrunning off to Peru with his best friend’s girlfriendand morerunning off to Peru with a girl who just got out of a relationship.
I swallow, meet his eye. “The others are waiting,” I say evenly. “We should go.”
There’s so much more I could say.
I could call him on his bullshit. I could twist the knife Blair put in his back. I could tell him that as much as it all hurts—as much as he doesn’t deserve it—every road I see us on eventually ends in forgiveness, because he’s like a brother to me, and I care more about healing the rift between us than punishing him for it indefinitely.
But it does still hurt, and I’m not ready to forgive just yet.
So I keep it all to myself for now, make my way down the cliff.
He doesn’t say another word.
“It didn’t look this high from the ground,” Sadie says, half an hour later, when we’re back at the top of the cliff with everyone for the group’s rappelling session.
“You make that sound like a bad thing,” Trey replies.
“It’sterrifying,” Zoe chimes in. “And we’re about to be dangling from this cliff on a rope? No thank you.”
