“I tell her everything.” I felt numb. “I tell you all everything.”
“We don’t even know him.” Amy looked close to tears.
“We should have been there for her through all of it,” I said. “We should have heard all about their first date, and their second date. We should have screamed with her after he proposed. Does she have a ring? We don’t even know.”
“But that’s the thing,” Eva said, “she didn’t want any of that. She wanted to keep all the details to herself.”
We were quiet for a minute, and then I asked the question that was starting to plague me more than any other.
“What did we do wrong? How could we have thought we were as close as ever, when Sumira felt the opposite? How did we push her away and not even realize it?” I didn’t add my last thought, which was ringing in my head:This is my fault.I was so self-absorbed that my friend didn’t want to confide in me. How could I not have noticed? Did I ever ask her about herself… ever? Did we always just talk about me? Had she actually, secretly, just not wanted to be friends anymore?
“She was hiding it from us, Rachel,” Eva said gently. “We couldn’t have known she felt that way.”
“Do you guys feel that way? Amy? You shut us out earlier this summer.”
Amy shook her head. “I was going through something. I was at rock bottom with the Stephen thing. I know how it feels to want some privacy. I can understand that.”
“But…” I took a deep breath. Something big was welling up inside me. Of course I’d had friendships that fizzled out over my lifetime. But it had never occurred to me that I might not have my three best-friends-forever… forever.
“I love our group chat,” Eva said. “I’d be lost without you guys.”
“Sumira did say that she doesn’t want our friendship to end over this,” Amy added.
“But if she can’t tell us about one of the most important things in her life,” I said slowly, “does that mean it’s already over?”
CHAPTER 23
ON THE OUTSIDE, MYlife seemed amazing. It was like what I’d imagined a few weeks before when I’d said I was going to work on myself. I was leading these discussions at work two or three times a week, and it was actually challenging and interesting and I was good at it. The seniors at the library had basically formed a Rachel Weiss fan club: I had my regulars who showed up every week whether they had a technology question or not. And I was doing Howard’s exercises every day. It had been ages since I’d gotten in a fight with my mom or drunk a whole bottle of wine by myself.
But inside I felt bruised and weepy. I felt like my heart was broken. All those songs people wrote about heartbreak? I got it now. They weren’t talking about romantic heartbreak. They were talking about losing a friend.
Through everything that had ever happened to me—job drama, family insanity, men—I had never questioned that my friends would be there. They had always been the constants in my life. I could take risks, I could be an idiot in other areas of my life, because I always had my friends to back me up, to bail me out, to lean on. And now it was like the pillars that held me up weren’t as sturdy as I’d always thought.
Why was I so much more hurt about Sumira keeping this secret from us than I had been about Amy sleeping with Stephen? Was it because I could understand Amy’s thinking—because I could understand what it felt like to act impulsively, even when it was wrong? What Sumira had done was different. She had purposely shut out her best friends, kept us in the dark about something huge and important. I had never shut out my friends before. I shared everything with them. I was an oversharer. I needed them in my life. I needed them to weigh in on the important things, to help make sense of life with me. The idea that Sumira could navigate a big life change without us… it made me think she didn’t need us anymore. Maybe didn’t even want us anymore? And that scared me.
Eva and Amy had both emailed Sumira, saying that they loved her and they were happy for her. But I couldn’t. I was angry at her, yes. But I also felt raw and exposed. Like her choosing to shut me out said something about me. Something I had been blind to. Something I didn’t want to see.
I’d never thought Ajay was someone Sumira would really like. If I’d thought that, I wouldn’t have said what I did about him. I felt horrible, looking back. I’d basically called him a joke, hadn’t I? That day at Mr. West, was it possible that she had been about to tell me something about Ajay? I could barely remember now, but surely we’d just been talking all about me and my problems. As usual.
The thing with Amy had been completely different, but I couldn’t help noticing a similarity: the fact that I had been too self-absorbed to notice anything amiss. The night that Amy met Stephen, I hadn’t noticed a thing. But they must have shared some glances, some conversation, something. And Sumira—who knew how many times she had tried to tell me about Ajay?Who knew how clear the signs had been, right in front of my face?
Thinking about all of this, it made me wonder why anyone would want to be my friend in the first place. I wasn’t prone to negative self-talk like this, and I didn’t like it. But I didn’t know what else I was supposed to think.
I was tired of feeling sorry for myself, so I got back on Tinder. It wasn’t like I was trying to replace Sumira with a guy. Or maybe I was. And maybe I was trying to find the old version of me. I didn’t know who I was without my friends, without a string of dates every week, without my usual upbeat attitude. Going on a date felt like a concrete action I could take to feel normal again.
Ten minutes after I started swiping, I had three conversations going. One of the guys asked if I was free tonight, so I said sure.
We met up at a bar in Belltown. I wore a slinky black dress with my curls all wrapped up in a polka-dot scarf. I’d also painted my nails blood red, because it was almost Halloween and I was going out in the night to meet a strange man like a hot-blooded dowager.
He was short but vaguely handsome, and he pecked my cheek in greeting.
“Rachel,” he said, and I could tell he was trying to make his voice sound lower than it was, “how thrilling to meet you.” This gave me pause. I wondered if he practiced saying different words in the mirror:how stunning to meet you, how fortuitous, how scrumptious.A little snort of laughter escaped me at this thought, and he—Connor—quirked an eyebrow at me.
“Oh, I’m not laughing at you, I was just rememberingsomething funny…” I trailed off at the nonplussed look on his face. “It’s really charming to meet you too, Connor. Shall we?” I motioned toward the bar, and he led the way to a couple of stools at the far end.
He dived into what I assumed was normal internet date preamble: how long we’d both lived in Seattle, what we did for work. He told me all about his job in the “music tech” industry, and after two French 75’s I was finding him quite interesting. His face had a pleasing, impish quality, and he was a good storyteller, though he talked about himself a fair amount.
And then, somehow, we pivoted to a topic I had naively assumed was not an appropriate part of the first-date repertoire.
