I read aloud and roll my eyes at the one-sentence, typewritten note I just opened from the unmarked envelope, shoved between the stack of bills that just came. I’d like to rip the paper to shreds and toss it into the garbage, but instead, I shove it into a manila folder in the bottom drawer of my desk with all the others until I have time to make copies and give them to the local police.

“Well, at least this one is direct and to the point,” my friend and coworker, Amelia, says from her seat in the chair across from my desk. “Why can’t they be more specific? Tell us exactly how you ruined their life. Did you pull out in front of them at an intersection? Were they behind you in line at the grocery store when you took eleven items to the ‘ten items or less’ line?”

I can’t help but laugh at the serious look on her face. It feels good to laugh. I haven’t had much to laugh about lately, and I can always count on Amelia to cheer me up.

“I will have you know I only took more than ten items through that line once and it was an emergency.”

“Was it a wine emergency?” she asks with a raise of one eyebrow.

“Maybe…” I trail off with another laugh.

“You have too much stress in your life right now. I think what you need is a visit from your special friend.”

She gives me a knowing wink, even using air quotes around the words special friend.

“Let’s just call it what it is. Grady is a booty call. I need a visit from my booty call and I’m one step ahead of you. I was just getting ready to send him a text.”

Amelia gives me a high five and I try not to feel guilty when I send the text. He knows the score. He agreed to it and I have nothing to feel guilty about.

After we share a few quiet minutes, Amelia gives me a soft smile.

“Don’t let it bother you. You know some people just don’t understand what you do here.”

Amelia Sparks came to our camp with her five-year-old son three years ago, needing something to help them both cope when her husband came home from deployment, and we became fast friends. So when Amelia lost her job as a hostess at a restaurant in downtown Charleston last year, I immediately offered her the position of activities director, which had just became vacant. She’s been a godsend in more ways than one, around here at the camp and in my life, especially lately. Just looking at her now, so different from when I first met her, I know the feeling is mutual.

When she first walked into this office, her long brown hair was in a messy ponytail, there were bags under her eyes, which were bloodshot from crying, and she was so skinny I immediately took her into the house and made her sit down and eat something. She whispered when she spoke and she was too nervous to meet my eyes when I tried to engage her in conversation. It took me a month to finally get her to tell me that her husband wasn’t handling being back home very well. He was always angry and always drinking, taking his pain and his fear out on her and their son, Dylan. With the help of our counselors, she and Dylan found strength and happiness, despite what was happening back home. Amelia learned how to take charge of her life and let go of the husband—who refused to get help—and put their family back together.

Her freshly highlighted brown hair falls in gentle curls around her shoulders, her makeup is beautiful and flawless, and the weight she put back on when she said good-bye to her depression gives her curves that I envy. She smiles easily and often, and she does whatever she can to pull me out of my own unhappiness, living her life to the fullest and making sure I’m doing the same.

I’m not, but it’s not for lack of trying on Amelia’s part.

“I’m fine,” I reassure her with a smile, sliding the bottom desk drawer closed. “It’s not the first angry note we’ve ever received, and it certainly won’t be the last.”

Now that my parents are semiretired and I’ve taken over running the camp for them, I continue handing the notes over to the police as a precaution, just like my parents have always done. Nothing bad has ever happened and I highly doubt anything ever will, but you can never be too safe when you run a camp filled with children. It still pisses me off that anyone would be angry about what we do here. Whether it be people who are against the camp in principle, someone who has a political agenda and hates anything involving war and soldiers, or someone who knew someone that went here, we’ve seen it all.

My parents turned the plantation my mother grew up on into the Rylan Edwards Camp for the Children of Veterans and Deployed Soldiers. When my father came back home from the war, he seemed like he had healed from the torture and abuse. But he was anything but fine. He spent months trapped in his own personal hell in his mind, seeing things that weren’t there and pretending like everything was fine so he could win back my mother’s love. His only focus was getting back to the woman he was forced to leave behind when he went off to war, and nothing else mattered to him, including his own health. With my mother’s help, he learned how to let go of the past and the pain, walk back into the light, and learn to live without regret. As soon as my father became well again, they knew there was nothing they’d rather do with their lives than create a safe place for other veterans and their families, to help them heal and teach them how to live again, without the pain and the guilt.

The outpouring of love and support they received was enormous. But you can’t make everyone happy, and along with love and support came a few bitter and angry individuals over the years. There will always be eccentric right-wing people and throw-back hippies who think what we do here is a political statement, and make it clear how displeased they are with us.

There will also always be family members who don’t appreciate the things we provide for their loved ones at Camp Rylan, no matter how much it benefits everyone. Not only do we provide a safe and happy place for children of military personnel, whether they are deployed, wounded, or deceased, but we also provide counseling as well. Over the years, we’ve had a few people, after participating in the counseling we provided, decide to make changes, which sometimes meant parting ways with their spouse or loved one, just like Amelia did with her husband.

Sometimes those decisions aren’t taken very well by all the parties involved. People get angry. People get upset. People want someone to blame. I try not to let the angry letters, e-mails, and phone calls we receive bother me, because I know how much those people are hurting. I know how hard it is for them to go off and fight a war and then come home and realize nothing will ever be the same again. I grew up in a very loving household, but my parents never sheltered me from the PTSD my father went through and continues to struggle with to this day. Even though he got better, he still has hard times every once in a while. There are still sleepless nights, or nights he wakes up screaming from a nightmare. I can relate to all of the campers on a personal level, which makes it so much harder to handle when someone doesn’t take the advice we give, or doesn’t believe in what we do.

But I know the good always outweighs the bad in the end, and the thankful and appreciative messages we receive are always far more numerous than the nasty ones.

Aiden used to always tell me this was a thankless, depressing job and he never understood how I handled it day in and day out. He would always joke that he made more than enough money and he would happily share it with me so I could be a woman of leisure and do something fun with my life instead of something he thought was depressing.

My eyes flit over to a framed picture of him on the corner of my desk, and it’s a struggle to keep myself in check and not break down in tears. With my hands in my lap, I fiddle with the ring that Aiden gave me. I should have probably put it away in a jewelry box after he died. It was too flashy and not really my style, but I wore it for him, because he gave it to me. I refuse to take it off now because looking down at it and touching it make me feel closer to him.

Amelia sees what I’m looking at, gently picks up the black frame, and turns it to face her, looking down at the photo with a smile.

“You guys were just babies in this picture. What were you, like ten or eleven?” she asks.

“Twelve,” I immediately reply, my voice cracking with emotion. “The boys were fifteen.”

I can’t even bring myself to say their names out loud. It’s been nine months since Aiden died. The pain isn’t as acute as it once was, but it’s still there, hovering under the surface whenever I think of him. It still hurts that he’s gone and left me here alone.

Aiden was the one person I could always count on to be here for me, and now he’s gone and I’ll never have that again.

“Look at that smirk on Aiden’s face. Such a cocky little shit, even as a teenager,” Amelia laughs.

I laugh along with her, having been the recipient of that smirk many times over the years and knowing exactly what Amelia means. Aiden was always so sure of himself. So sure of his life and the world around him, and he didn’t care what anyone thought of him. He thought very highly of himself and that’s all that mattered. It came off as snobby and arrogant to most, but to those who really knew him, it was just Aiden. Underneath all that confidence was a guy with a big heart who loved his friends and would do anything for them.

My eyes start to fill with tears when I think about the fact that I’ll never see that damn smirk again. I’ll never listen to him joke about how good he looked or listen to him brag about how much money he made in commissions that month. He’ll never cheer me up by being so much of a pompous idiot that it always made me laugh. He’ll never go out of his way to be the best friend he possibly could, always knowing there was something missing and a hole in my heart that nothing could fix, no matter how hard he tried. He did whatever he could to help me forget that one of the Three Musketeers was missing and that made everything feel off and wrong. Since he died, every sad moment has been amplified and made worse because Everett isn’t here to talk to about it. Every happy moment has been tinged with the sting of regret that Everett wasn’t here to experience it with me.

“Whenever I saw you and Aiden together, I had all sorts of daydreams about the beautiful babies you’d make together. He was such a cutie with that cocky smirk and sense of humor,” Amelia says with a shake of her head as she continues to stare at the photo.

“Yeah, well, you never saw Everett in person,” I mutter, wanting to take the words back as soon as they leave my mouth.

It feels like a slap in the face to Aiden’s memory thinking about how much hotter Everett was to me than Aiden. Where Aiden always felt safe and like coming home whenever I looked at him, Everett always made me feel the exact opposite. Like I needed to fan my face and cross my legs together tightly.

“Jesus, Everett was a hottie even at fifteen. I feel really dirty right now. But from what you and Aiden both told me about him over the years, he was too much of a bad boy, too broody, and too much of a jerk. Makes sense since he hasn’t given a shit about you or given you a second thought in four years. I know you told me you used to have a crush on Everett back then, but Aiden was clearly the much better choice,” Amelia mutters, setting the picture back on top of my desk and turning it back around to face me.

I don’t want to look, but I can’t help myself. My eyes automatically go to the boy standing on the opposite side of me in the photo. Aiden and Everett both had short brown hair and they both stood around the same height, at least a head taller than me in the photo since I was three years younger than them.

They were similar in looks back then, but where Aiden was always laughing and happy, Everett’s smile never quite reached his eyes in all the years I’d known him. It was always a lot of work to even coax a smile from him and almost impossible to pull out a laugh. Amelia’s right. He was broody and he was a bad boy, but he wasn’t a jerk when we were kids, at least not around me. Maybe that’s why I was so drawn to him when we were little. I wanted to fix him. I wanted to make him smile and I wanted to make him laugh. I wanted to be the one to take away the pain of losing his father at such a young age, and having to live with a mother who stopped caring about him and his brother after her husband died. I spent too many years chasing after a dream, and wishing on stars for something that, in the end, was a huge waste of time. Everett never wanted my help. He never wanted to be fixed and he never wanted me.

Almost five years he’s been gone. All these years without an e-mail or a phone call. Nothing. I’ve blamed myself all these years because maybe I should’ve asked him to stay the night before he left for his assignment overseas. Maybe I made it seem that we didn’t need him, that we’d be fine without him, that we’d forget about him, so he decided to push us away first. I blamed myself because not only did I lose him, but Aiden lost him as well because of what I’d done.

But then I found out he hadn’t ignored both of us. I found out a few weeks before Aiden died that he still e-mailed Aiden when he could, and he still called him when he had time. It was just me he left behind. Just me he didn’t give a shit about throwing away after twenty-plus years of friendship. Just me he didn’t care about.

It pissed me off and it hurt. Aiden’s been dead for nine months and I’m sad and I miss him every day. Everett’s been out of my life for almost five years and I hate that it hurts more. I hate that I miss him more. I hate that I feel like I’m tarnishing Aiden’s memory by being sadder about a man who just doesn’t give a shit about me. A man who I thought was my best friend, who I wished on entirely too many stars that someday he’d be more until I finally had to give up and move on with my life.

“I hate to bring the mood down in here even more, but have you talked to your parents yet?” Amelia asks, pulling me out of my depressing thoughts and my eyes away from that damn photo.

“No, not aside from the usual ‘How are things going?’ phone calls every couple of days. I can’t tell them the extent of the problems, Amelia, not yet. This camp is their entire life. Their dream. I can’t bring myself to tell them we might have to close after this summer session. I can’t break their hearts right now when I finally managed to get them out of town two days ago and take a real vacation for the first time in forever,” I tell her with a sigh as I start opening the stack of bills in front of me that I’ve been avoiding for a week.

Camp Rylan has always been free for participants since the doors opened. My parents wouldn’t even hear of making people pay for their children to escape real life for a while and be with other children who understood all the struggles they were going through. With generous donations and grants from individuals and corporations, along with the huge charity function I throw here before the start of every summer session, we’ve never had any problems getting everything we need to make this camp run smoothly. Unfortunately, our biggest benefactor, the one who has almost single-handedly kept Camp Rylan open for twenty-seven years with his yearly donation, recently passed away and his remaining family members are cold-hearted assholes who have cut off all of his charitable donations. Jack Alexander, the founder and CEO of one of the largest car manufacturing plants in the United States, was like family to us. He never had one of his assistants mail in his yearly donation. He’d get in a car and drive himself out here on his own, all the way from New York every summer, to attend the charity function and present us with the check. He would be rolling over in his grave right now if he knew what his family had done.

“I’m hoping I can figure something out before they come home for the charity gala next month. I have a few phone calls out to some companies, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I hear something soon. There’s one guy who actually replied right away to my e-mail. I’ve done some research on him, and he’s a little weird and has a lot of strict rules about who he gives his money to. My parents would need to be here since he only gives his money to happily married couples who run nonprofit organizations. I’m hoping he’ll be my last resort and I won’t have to involve them, but just in case, I told him the earliest we could meet would be the weekend of the charity dinner, and I confirmed the date and time with him. I can always cancel if we find something else in the meantime,” I explain to Amelia.

If I’m being honest, even with the charity event, the assistance from the government, and the other miscellaneous donations we get throughout the year, it’s not enough to run a camp like this on a plantation this size. All of those things added up would barely cover the cost of electricity and pay for everyone’s salary who works here. We’ve relied on Jack’s donation for years and now I need to find someone as amazing and kindhearted as he was, but it’s like finding a needle in a haystack at this point. Even the money Aiden left to the camp after he died, every penny he’d ever saved, didn’t put a dent in our mounting debt. I’ve contemplated asking Aiden’s parents for help, but I don’t want to put them in an uncomfortable position of feeling like they have to do something like this. They moved away after Aiden died, unable to handle the memories here in Charleston, and I don’t want to add to their grief by letting them know the money their son left me wasn’t enough. I’ve gone beyond the point of being worried and am now in full-blown panic mode.

I practically begged my parents to transition everything over to me after Aiden died. They were planning on doing it in time, but I needed something else to focus on after he was gone. I needed something else to occupy my thoughts other than missing him. When they finally relented and passed the torch to me, I wouldn’t take anything less than total control. Of the camp, of the decisions, and of the money. They know that with Jack dying we’re struggling, but I’ve managed to keep them in the dark about just how much. I refuse to let my parents down. I refuse to let the children and the families who come to this camp down. I grew up here, I met Aiden and Everett here, and all of my best childhood memories are wrapped up in this place. I refuse to let thoughts of Everett Southerland mess with my head and my heart when I have something much more important to worry about. He’s a part of my past that I need to let go of, no matter how much it hurts.

No matter how much my heart breaks that I didn’t lose just one of my best friends, I lost them both. And I’ll never get either one of them back.