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“I always cooked,” Kai said, mixing mango salsa.

“Barbecue sauce on spaghetti isn’t cooking.”

“I boiled pasta, dude. It was definitely cooking.”

“What is this wine?” I said, turning the bottle.

“Sauvignon Blanc. Apparently it’s elegant and restrained, unlike anyone in this kitchen,” Kai said.

Callie threw her head back, glass in hand, and laughed. Her new stationery samples were taped to the fridge. Duck-egg blue and champagne gold and polka dots.

“So, um,” Callie said, shifting on her feet. “We invited Jess.”

There were two seconds of silence, then Damian and I shrugged.

“Good,” I said. “I’m tired of being mad at her.”

The four of us had patched together our friendship over the group chat, Jess becoming more apologetic with every line she sent. Regardless of what happened that night, she was still a woman I’d lived through hell with.

She arrived first, bringing the wine Callie had fallen in love with after Kai recommended it. He was now a de facto sommelier, or liked to think of himself as such. She hovered at the edge of the kitchen, almost apologetically, until I hugged her gingerly and handed her a glass. Priya arrived ten minutes later, baklava and yet more wine in hand. She hesitated when she saw Jess, but recovered quickly, smiling in a way that almost reached her eyes.

Jess looked tired, but, it turned out, for the right reasons. Soren was now a cautionary memory, and in August she’d found a small space above a bail bondsman on Fourth Street she could actually afford to rent on her own. She opened her phone and showed us a picture of the ugliest storefront in Eureka that she was now working twelve-hour days to spruce up.

“I’m so sick of paint samples,” she said.

“I can get you a discount on the colors you choose,” I said. That was my olive branch.

“You can?”

“I just got my redesign certificate. I get a trade discount.”

“Congrats,” she said, giving me the first real smile I’d seen from her since she’d told us about meeting Soren. Over dinner, Priya told us about Greg.

“He’s an accountant,” she said.

“You said that like it’s terminal,” Callie said.

“He has a labrador named Steve. He meal-preps and watches football. He’s incredibly normal.”

“Does he know about…” Callie started, then made a small swerve in the air with her glass, “your interesting year?”

“He knows I have interesting friends. Nothing else is explainable, so it won’t be explained.”

And that was the thing we’d all understood without ever once saying it. We were six people around the table who’d been there, and there would never be seven. Whatever else we were to each other, lovers or friends or friends-on-probation, we were survivors of something we couldn’t explain to anyone else. It wasn’t a group you could join, and it wasn’t a group you could leave.

Callie made us take a photo before dessert, all six of us crammed onto their sofa. Later she posted it to the group chat next to the one from the jeep. Four strangers, laughing, faintly drunk, with no idea. Before and after, she wrote.

Priya wrote back: the brides. We’d made the word ours in a car on the way to a haunted house, and none of us had said it since. I look at both of those photos now, side by side, more than I look at anything. Not just because we all survived. Because in the first one, we were already us. We just hadn’t been introduced.

I ended up drying dishes next to Callie while the others argued in the living room about whether Steve or Travis was a worse name for a labrador.

“She held the circle the second time,” Callie said, quietly, looking at the glass in her hands. “I’m trying to think about that more than the other part. It doesn’t absolve her,” she said, setting the glass on the draining rack.

“No,” I said.

“But it’s something.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s something.”