For the Love of Friends(84)

“Lily?”

“Yeah?”

“It was good. I mean, not the parts where you made fun of me. But the writing was really good.”

I thanked her and got off the phone before I started to cry in earnest again. I wasn’t even sure which part I was crying over anymore, but I cried harder than I had after telling Alex I couldn’t be with him.





CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE


I tried calling Caryn, but she sent me to voicemail each time. Eventually, I left her a message. “It’s Lily. Please call me back. I want to apologize and figure out how to make this right. I—I’m really sorry. Please call me.”

If she didn’t call back, I didn’t know how I was going to face her at work on Tuesday. And it didn’t help not knowing if it would be my last day. I had spent ten years at the foundation; my résumé was pretty dusty.

I looked at Megan’s name on my list and considered letting her jump the line. She should be one of the easier calls, but I hesitated. I wasn’t ready to talk to her. Was I in the wrong? Absolutely. But I had also just made a huge sacrifice for her, bigger than any I had ever made in my life. And the fact that none of her messages acknowledged that beyond saying she was glad that I hadn’t slept with Alex—did she even read the post? It was never about sleeping with him. I mean, yes, that probably would have happened if I hadn’t said no, but this wasn’t a hookup.

I felt terrible about hurting her, but I also felt terrible that she didn’t realize she had hurt me. And I couldn’t talk to her until I could make the conversation not be about me losing one of the most important people in my life because I was trying to do right by her. Which I couldn’t do yet.

No. It was better to go in order. It was time to call Sharon. With the exception of saying she needed to be brave enough to stand up to her mom, I didn’t think my posts about her were that bad. I mean, I was saying what she wished she had the courage to say to her mother. But her tear-filled voicemail told me that her mother was going to make her life miserable over this, and that was my fault.

“It wasn’t you, right?” she said by way of a greeting.

I paused. “No. It was me.”

There was a sharp intake of breath past her teeth. “I see,” she said, echoing her mother’s censure of choice. A tiny piece of my heart that hadn’t yet shattered fell apart. Despite it all, Sharon still wanted to please her mother, even if doing so meant becoming her.

“I’m so, so sorry.” She was silent. “I never wanted to hurt you—please know that. The whole thing started because of Caryn’s friends, but without the context of the five weddings, it didn’t make sense why I was so—God, I don’t even know—jaded? Cynical?”

“Mean?” she supplied.

“Yes. Mean too.” The Buzzfeed post said I might just be the snarkiest person in the world, which I hoped was hyperbolic. “But I tried to focus on the people who were making my life difficult, and you never once did that.”

“Lily, you called my mother a Japanese horror monster and said her skin was pulled so tight from plastic surgery that you were worried it would split open during the wedding and all of the demons inside her would come spilling out.”

Crap. I did say that, didn’t I?

But Sharon wasn’t done. “Not to mention you called me spineless when it came to her and said I would throw myself off a bridge if she told me to.”

“I didn’t say ‘spineless,’ but—I mean, you didn’t even want this wedding.”

The next thing she said was so quiet that I almost couldn’t hear it. “I did, actually.”

“You told me you wanted to elope and your mother was forcing you to have a wedding.”

I heard her start to cry. Which didn’t mean she was upset; Sharon cried when she was angry instead of yelling. “She ‘forced’ me because I wasn’t brave enough to do it if she didn’t push me. I’ve been in therapy for eight years to deal with my social anxiety issues, and I said I wanted to elope because I didn’t think anyone would actually come if I had a real wedding.”

“I—didn’t know any of that.”

“Of course you didn’t. I hide it. Not that you ever asked if I was okay when I didn’t go out to things. You just stopped inviting me.”

I stopped inviting her because she always said no. She was busy, or tired, or had other plans. But wasn’t that the hallmark of social anxiety? Struggling to say yes to social outings?

Sharon and I had lived together for two years. She usually went out when I did in college, but she almost always had a drink or two at home first. But after college, she moved home to save money for a couple years, and I moved to Bethesda, first with Megan, then with Becca, when Megan switched jobs and wanted to move farther north. When Sharon stopped coming out, I just assumed her mother was exerting her domineering force over Sharon’s social life and that I had been cut out.

If that wasn’t the case—what had I just done to my friend?

“So you—wanted the big wedding with the white dress and the whole nine yards?”

“Yes. I want to get to do everything that everyone else does too.”

“But you always said—”

“I didn’t think anyone would want to marry me, so I pretended I didn’t want any of it.”