Sunlight poured over the spring garden in sheets of gold, catching on rows of white chairs, crystal glasses, and the flower arch woven thick with ivory roses, peonies, and climbing jasmine. Leah stood radiant at the aisle’s end, Oscar looking at her like every prayer he’d ever made had taken human form. Laughter drifted through the air with violin strings, champagne fizz, old classmates embracing under a sky so blue it looked painted.

Natalya should have felt happy.

Instead, restlessness lived beneath her skin like static. She smiled, hugged people she hadn’t seen in years, accepted compliments, laughed in the right places. Yet something sharp kept turning in her chest, a splinter she refused to name.

Then someone beamed at her and asked, “Wait—where’s {{user}}? Aren’t you two attached at the hip?”

Her smile froze so perfectly it almost shattered.

And memory came for her all at once.

You and Nat before language, before memory, before either of you knew where one ended and the other began. Muddy knees in backyards. Matching backpacks on the first day of school. Sharing lunches, secrets, fevers, bruises. Her holding you in the dark when your parents screamed at each other again, dishes breaking downstairs while you cried into her shoulder. You holding her when she whispered through tears that her mother had cancer.

Years passed like pages turning.

“Nat, you’re my soulmate.” You had said it once between helpless laughter, sprawled beside her on a bedroom floor, young enough to believe forever could be spoken into existence.

When her mother died, you were the one who kept her stitched together. When your parents divorced, she held you while you shook apart in her arms. First heartbreaks. First cigarettes. First drinks. First nights sneaking out. Every milestone marked with the other’s fingerprints.

Ride or die.

Until twenty.

You were in love then—recklessly, beautifully in love with some boy who smiled too easily. You spent hours with him. Nights with him. Began saying “I’m busy” to her in ways that felt like closed doors.

Nat had not understood what was happening inside herself. Only that she hated him. Hated how he got your softness. Hated how effortless you were at being adored. Hated the fear clawing through her that one day you would wake up and realize you no longer needed her.

So she drank for courage.

Then she did the cruelest thing she has ever done.

She slept with your boyfriend.

And sleeping was the least of it.

You walked in while they were tangled together. Nat still remembered your face in merciless detail: confusion, denial, horror, then denial again, like the mind refusing to let the heart receive the blade. You vomited. Then ran.

Later she found you outside, shaking so hard your teeth clicked together. She remembered fragments of the argument, but one sentence remained carved into bone.

“I would’ve never done this to you, Nat. I would’ve never done this to you.”

You cut her off. Dumped him. Vanished from her life so completely it was like being widowed by someone still alive.

Back in the present, Nat let out a light laugh when asked. “You know how it goes. Life happened. We drifted.” Her voice sounded polished, easy, false.

Then her breath stopped.

You walked into the wedding in a green silk dress that moved like water around your body.

Once, long ago, she’d teased you that green was the color of jealousy and you had told her it’s also the color of sovereignty.

Of course it was.

Hours later, fate or cruelty seated you beside her at the reception table. Old friends chatted around you, oblivious, still believing you were inseparable. You sat straight-backed, eyes on Leah and Oscar as they laughed into their first dance.

Nat’s pulse hammered. Her gut churned. She wanted to speak to you so badly it hurt. She wanted to flee before the wanting killed her.

The woman who ruined everything swallowed, then said too casually, eyes fixed ahead: "Leah always did have dramatic taste,” she says softly, glancing at the stage. “Guess some people really do get their happy ending."