“I realize that my running off like this puts you in a bad position.” I caught a glimpse of my eyes in the rear-view mirror as I spoke, the anxiety still coursing through my veins coming through in the worry lines between them. I told myself to relax. What was the worst that could happen?

“A bad position?” My boss laughed, but there was no happiness in the sound. I’d heard him laugh that way in court, whenever opposing counsel would object to whichever brilliant tactic he’d put into play. The man was a shark, and I was swimming with him.

“I can’t apologize any more than I already have, Jim, but I’ll tell you one more time how sorry I am and how unavoidable this is. It’s an emergency.” I got on the interstate, the pre-dawn traffic still light enough that I could maneuver with ease. Within an hour or two, all hell would break loose. I hoped I’d be able to put enough distance between New York and me by the time rush hour started, that it wouldn’t be too big of a crimp in my schedule. Then I laughed at myself for even thinking the word. I had no schedule in place. I was flying by the seat of my pants—or, rather, driving by it.

“An emergency so dire, it means giving up your spot on one of the most important cases the firm has ever handled? Amanda, this case could mean your partnership.”

A sour feeling made a home for itself in the pit of my stomach. Yes, I had been telling myself that for hours, too, ever since I got the call that had shaken me out of my stupor and put me on the road. I swallowed back the bile rising in my throat. “Yes, well, I just have to live with that, don’t I?”

“I can’t believe you’re serious.” I could imagine him in his home office, probably already drinking a whiskey at five in the morning. He was just that sort of man, the kind who thought it was still the early sixties and men could still get away with a whiskey in one hand and a secretary’s ass in the other during working hours. The man lived on dark liquor and darker coffee. He loved telling the story of how he’d started off as a fifteen-year-old clerk in the firm’s mail room before working his way up to an assistant—something men never did in those days, he was always quick to point out—and had earned such favor with the firm’s partners that they’d put him through law school. He’d idolized those men and had patterned his life after theirs, even though the world had changed. Only his brilliant legal mind kept him out of trouble.

“I’m very serious, Jim. So serious that I’m already on the road. This is unexpected, I know, and a terrible inconvenience.”

“I realize you’ve been through a lot in the last year,” he started, his voice gruff but slightly apologetic.

“And this has nothing to do with that,” I reminded him. “Besides, it’s not as if I ever let my personal life get in the way of my work before. I didn’t ask any favors then, did I?”

“No, that’s true.”

“And I still managed to bill more hours than anybody else, didn’t I?”

“Also true,” he sighed. “I feel like you have me on the witness stand.”

“Maybe you are,” I chuckled. So he was starting to thaw. “Listen, Jim. I understand if this puts me in jeopardy.”

“It doesn’t have to, as long as we keep this little vacation short.”

I rolled my eyes at his carefully chosen jab. Vacation. Hardly. “I’ll do the best I can,” I promised, unwilling to give him more information than he strictly needed. “You know how these family things can sometimes be.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?” he asked, and I could hear him shutting down as he said it. Everything from that point on would be from a script. What To Say When Your Employee Cites A Personal Emergency.

“No, thanks. You’re already doing enough. I’ll keep you posted, and I’ll leave word with Meredith to contact me with any issues that arise.” I got off the phone as fast as I could after that, and only once the call ended did I release my tension in a sigh of relief. That fire was out, or at least under control for the time being. I could “circle back”—just one of the many bits of corporate speak I was so tired of hearing—in a day or two.

Nothing gets a person out of work quicker than a family emergency, I thought with a rueful smile. Especially one with few details—probably because I didn’t have many details to share as yet. It was an emergency, for sure, though the word “family” wasn’t strictly truthful. There was no DNA shared between Craig and me, though a lifetime’s worth of memories was stronger than any blood tie. At least, any of my blood ties. He was all the family I had, and he was dying. He might have been dead already, for all I knew.

My hands tightened on the steering wheel, and tears prickled behind my eyes. No, I couldn’t afford to cry yet. I’d only have to pull over to the side of the road and lose precious time. If it wouldn’t have taken just as long, if not longer, to book a last-minute flight down to Virginia, I would have flown and cried my eyes out throughout the flight. But a phone call at three in the morning with urgent news hadn’t given me many choices. I could have waited until a ten o’clock flight or I could get into the car and start driving, and probably make it there sooner. So I’d hauled my things down to the car.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I whispered for probably the fiftieth time. Would I ever get to ask him face-to-face and get an answer? Would I always have to wonder why my best friend hadn’t told me of the Stage Four cancer that had torn his body to shreds? The thought that he didn’t want me there left me cold and quaking inside. Why didn’t he want me with him? Wasn’t I important enough? Didn’t I deserve the chance to tell him how much I loved him before he left forever?

I might never know. The hospice nurse who’d called told me he was in a coma, and that he’d left instructions for her to call me when the end was near. What the hell was the point of that? Just the thought made me furious. What game was he playing? He wanted me there, but only when he had hours left and would be beyond the point of communication? I was sure the pain in my chest was the breaking of my heart. A heart that had already been broken one too many times—something he knew, damn it.

Why, why, why. The question haunted me as the highway unfurled before me and the minutes ticked away. I passed through Philadelphia just as the morning commute traffic began and sat in traffic that made my hands clench the wheel and more than just a few choice words fly from my mouth.

Once I left the city limits, things eased up, and I managed to maintain a steady pace as I moved on through Delaware. I stopped for coffee and a sandwich, making a pit stop at the coffee shop’s bathroom while I waited for the food to be prepared. I laughed out loud when I caught sight of myself in the mirror over the sink. What did the people behind the counter, not to mention the other customers, think about the woman who’d walked in with last night’s eye makeup in dark circles under her eyes? I’d cried all throughout the packing process, and it showed. My hair was a mess, too, the waves I’d worked carefully on before joining a few girlfriends for a book club meeting now gathered in a tangled bun on top of my head. I hadn’t even put on a bra before fleeing the apartment, my night shirt and pajama pants under a long coat. At least it hid most of my outfit.

I did what I could to wash my face before leaving the restroom, and when I hit the road again, it was with the aid of caffeine in my bloodstream. I had hundreds of miles left to drive, and I was terrified that I’d already wasted time even though I needed something to eat. I was never one to skip meals when I was stressed—just the opposite.

The closer I got to home, the larger the feeling of dread in my stomach. I told myself to relax, that just because I hadn’t been home in—God, almost twenty years—didn’t mean anything. People built new lives every day, and it wasn’t exactly as though there was much in Roaring Forks to keep me coming back for more. Only Craig and he’d been up to visit me, or we’d met in the middle, usually in Philly or somewhere nearby, whenever we got together over the years. He’d understood how the thought of being back in our hometown made my skin crawl. Was that why he hadn’t called me back sooner? I whimpered a little at the thought while I turned the wheels in the direction of my exit. Didn’t he know I loved him enough to put all of that aside? That he didn’t need to be drawing his last breath to get me to make the trip? Was I not a good enough friend to him?

I hated myself for even thinking it, for even having a reason to think it. As I drove down roads ridiculously familiar even after two decades’ absence, I reviewed how much I’d leaned on him throughout everything. He knew every detail of my life—the strain of law school, the endless hours when I’d first started at the firm, the men who’d wandered in and out of my life before one certain man made his home in my heart, then crushed it. He knew it all, that best friend of mine. And he hadn’t trusted me enough to tell me he had cancer.

“No, that’s not it,” I murmured as memories crowded thicker and faster the closer home got. Home. Funny how I could think of it as home when it hadn’t been for so long. More than half my life. Yet it was, still, the place I would tell people I came from. No matter that I’d lived in New York just as long as I’d lived in Roaring Forks. I was still from a little backwater town in Virginia, no more than a speck on a map.

It wasn’t that he hadn’t trusted me enough, and I needed to keep that in mind. He loved me. And he was stubborn as the day was long. He never wanted people to fuss over him, even when he’d graduated Valedictorian of our senior class—with me just behind him, of course, in the second spot. He’d tried to get out of making a speech at graduation, for Christ’s sake. Why he’d returned home after his residency instead of doing, oh, just about anything else was beyond me. He could’ve ruled the world. He was just that smart. Instead, he’d worked at a clinic in town.

I swiped a hand across my cheek as a rogue tear slipped free and traced a trail over my skin. God, I loved him. I loved him so much. He was all I had left after the mess my life had dissolved into. And I couldn’t even keep him. And he didn’t tell me, damn him forever. Grief and rage and deep, burning helplessness fought a desperate war inside me as I drove through the heart of town. It hadn’t changed at all. I relied on memory to get me to the little house his parents had left him in their Will. I had spent endless hours there throughout high school as we’d studied and pushed each other to do better and better. The two most serious students in school. Maybe in the entire town. Soulmates.

Instead of hurrying there after school to cram for a Biology final, I was hurrying to say goodbye. He didn’t want to be in hospice care, the nurse had explained, so she’d stayed with him. Of course. Stubborn to the end. He had to have everything his way.

There was a car in the driveway, which I guessed was Craig’s, then two more parked in front of the two-story, gray-blue house with white shutters and gingerbread trim. I’d always felt so much more at home there than I had at my own house. Craig’s parents were the parents I’d wanted before I’d started wanting other things. No, I’d always wanted other things, much more than life had afforded me at the outset. But then again, there I was, with everything in the world I’d always wanted and nothing I cared very much about.

I jumped out of the car the moment I had it in park and ran toward the house, taking the front steps two at a time and barreling through the front door.

There he was, in the middle of a tastefully furnished living room. Tastefully furnished except for the hospital bed in the center, at least. And he was gone. I knew it without being told. It was the silence in the room. No labored breathing. No breathing at all.

“No.” I stumbled to the side of the bed and took his painfully thin hand in mine. “No, no. No fair. No.” It didn’t make sense. I sounded like a five-year-old demanding to skip naptime.

A hand on my shoulder. Yes, there were others in the room, but Craig was the only one I cared to look at. God, was that really him? He’d lost so much weight. He had that sunken look cancer patients took on at the end. I wouldn’t have recognized a picture of him if nobody told me who it was.

“He passed an hour ago,” the voice belonging to the hand touching my shoulder murmured. “I’m sure he wanted to hang on for you, but he couldn’t anymore.”

Through the thick haze of pain in my head, through the barely withheld screams and pleas for Craig to come back to me, the voice filtered through. The sound of it. I knew that voice. I hadn’t heard it in twenty years, and it was a little deeper than it had been the day he pushed me out of his life once and for all, but it was him for sure.

I pried my eyes from Craig’s peaceful face and looked up into the red-rimmed eyes of my high school sweetheart.

“Dawson,” I breathed.