Page 111 of Never Not Friends

What would’ve happened if Emma had let me come over that night after college?

Would Juliet and I even be here, getting married in five days?

As in this week. On Saturday.

So I’m running out of time to figure it out.

“What do you think about this picture?” Juliet tilts her head, examining one of us at our high school graduation. “If you have a graduation picture together, you should probably put it in your wedding slideshow, right?”

I try to muster some enthusiasm. “Probably.”

A picture of Juliet hugging my little sisters comes on the screen next, and I smile. “You have to use that one. My sisters worship you.”

“I love them too.” She hearts the picture then keeps flipping through an album on her phone she’s been working on for weeks of “possible” pictures that could be included.

And I start to notice a pattern with each new photo on the screen.

Emma.

She’s there at every major life event.

Each picture tells me a different story than what it used to, than what it’s telling Juliet.

The day Juliet got her new car in high school. Emma’s dog had just died, so her eyes are puffy with grief.

The first pair of scrubs Juliet bought and wanted to do a fashion show with. Emma’s smile was a little bigger that day because her sister had just gotten engaged a couple of minutes earlier.

When I bought my townhome. It’s just Juliet and me in the picture, but you can see the corner of Emma’s thumb in the frame when she took the picture, because she had a huge bandage over her fingers from slamming her hand in the car door earlier that week.

Picture after picture.

It’s weird how much of my life with Juliet has Emma woven through it.

Even down to how Juliet and I got together.

“You know, there’s something I’ve been thinking about that I can’t quite remember.” I sit up, suddenly more interested in finding answers than pictures. “When I came home from Cal Poly, what happened?”

Juliet keeps swiping through the album, weeding out ones that didn’t make the cut. “What do you mean?”

“Like, what happened between us. How did we get back together? Do you remember?”

She laughs, glancing over her shoulder at me. “You don’t remember?”

“No, I do…I just…I can’t quite figure out how we came to be when neither of us had planned to get back together again.” I shift uncomfortably into the cushion. “I mean, isn’t that what we decided that night I got home from college, when I came to visit you?”

She lowers her phone and turns to me. “Yeah, we both said that night that we’d be better off as friends. But then we kept hanging out…”

And Emma kept avoiding me because she thought I wanted Juliet. My stomach tightens at the thought.

“...and things just fell back into how they used to be.” She lifts her shoulders. “It wasn’t anything big. Just sort of happened naturally, you know?”

I nod in agreement because I do know. Neither of us really pursued the other. We just…fell back together.

Both home.

Both single.

Hanging out one night became another.