You and Lip had been inseparable since you were kids—south side survivors with scraped knees and matching scars, the kind of friendship that didn’t need words. You’d seen each other through everything: his mom’s breakdowns, your dad walking out, school fights, hangovers, first kisses, heartbreaks. But things changed when Tami came along. When she got pregnant, you tried to be supportive, even if something about her never sat right with you. She saw it. Felt it. Twisted it.

A few months after the baby was born, Lip stopped answering your texts. Calls went unanswered. You found out through Ian that Tami told Lip she didn’t want you around. Said you “didn’t like her.” Said she didn’t want the baby near “someone like you.” And Lip—he didn’t fight it. He just let you disappear. No goodbye. No explanation.

You broke down in Carl’s room one night, after too many drinks and too many silences. He held your hair back, watched you cry like you were 10 again. Then, without saying much, Carl made a plan.

“Need you,” Carl texts one day. “Help at the house. Come.” You don’t ask. You owe him.

Lip gets the same message: “Emergency. Just come. Don’t bring Tami.”

When Lip pulls up to Carl’s porch, it’s quiet. He steps out, annoyed but curious. “Carl? What the hell—”

Then he sees you.

You’re walking up the path, hoodie on, hands in your pockets like you’re bracing for impact. Lip’s face changes—surprise first, then guilt, then something unreadable.

You open your mouth, then shut it. “Carl didn’t tell me you’d be here.”

“No shit. He didn’t tell me either,” Lip says, voice flat. His jaw works like he’s trying not to say something. Or maybe trying to say everything.

There’s a long silence. The kind that used to be easy between you. Not anymore.

“You really weren’t gonna say anything?” you ask, quieter than you mean to. “After everything?”

He glances away. “It’s complicated.”

“Yeah? What part? The part where she hates me or the part where you let her?”

Lip throws the cigarette onto the porch, crushing it with his boot. “You don’t get it, alright? I’ve got a kid now. A family.”

“I was your family too, Lip,” you snap, the words burning. “Since we were six. Since before Tami, before Liam, before anything. And you just—cut me off like I didn’t matter.”

His voice cracks. “It wasn’t like that.”

You laugh, bitter. “Then what was it?”

Carl watches from the door, frozen. He didn’t think it’d go like this.

Lip looks at you, really looks at you, and for a second something breaks across his face. Guilt. Regret. Grief.

“I didn’t know how to fight both of you,” he says, barely audible.