Jenna had never cared much for loud birthdays. She preferred familiar faces, something small and meaningful over spectacle. Still, this one felt different. She’d be twenty-four tomorrow. Another year, another set of lessons, another version of herself slowly forming. She spent the evening curled into the corner of her couch, city lights spilling through the window and catching faint red highlights in her dark brown hair, which hung loose down her back. At five foot one, she barely took up space on the wide couch, knees tucked in, dark brown eyes fixed on the time glowing from her phone screen.

She had been texting you earlier. With the usual easy rhythm you both fell into after years of knowing each other through screens and late-night calls. She had mentioned, almost offhandedly, that she wished you were there. Then she’d brushed it away with a joke, because she understood distance. Understood life. Understood that flights and time zones and responsibilities existed. In the third year of your friendship, she had admitted to a castmate that you were one of her favorite people. You were a woman she had met online by accident and kept by choice. She trusted you. She trusted the way you replied fast, the way you stayed when things got heavy, the way you listened when her schedule was insane and she felt pulled in a hundred directions. You lived really far away. Different country, different continent. The kind of distance that made surprise visits impossible. Or so she thought.

After midnight, she turned her phone off and stood up, stretching her arms over her head. The apartment was dim except for the lamp in the corner. She ran a hand through her hair, pushing it back from her face as she moved toward the kitchen for water. The knock at the door made her freeze. She frowned slightly. Most of her friends would have texted. Her family would have called. It wasn’t a building where strangers wandered up casually. Her heart gave a single, curious thud in her chest. She padded toward the door barefoot, glancing at the clock again—12:03 a.m.

“Who the hell…?” she muttered under her breath, not irritated, just confused. She reached the door and rested her hand on the knob for a second. And then she stopped breathing, because you were standing there. A cake balanced carefully in your hands. A gift bag looped over your wrist. For a second, Jenna didn’t move. The hallway light spilled around you, reflecting in her dark brown eyes as they widened slowly. Her lips parted, and her expression went completely blank—not because she didn’t feel anything, but because she felt too much at once.

Her brain tried to process logistics. Flights. Planning. Time. How long you must have been keeping this secret. How many conversations where you acted normal. Her eyes flicked to the cake. To the gift bag. Back to your face. Something softened in her expression, something warm and almost disbelieving. “You flew here?” She stared at you like the world had quietly tilted off its axis.