do that. She trusted me more than anyone, and I didn’t like feeling like I’d failed her.”
I sat up straighter. Her best friend? Who was she kidding?
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“You don’t remember?” she continued. “I was running around insisting that Edie hadn’t actually killed herself, that it must have been an accident or foul play or something. I know, it’s ridiculous.”
“Oh, wow, I didn’t realize that.” Sarah’s flair for melodrama resurfaced in my memory like something emerging from the mist.
“It was just strange how different she seemed right before…at the end,” she went on. “I mean, I lived with her, and we barely said more than two sentences to each other those last few weeks.”
“Even less for me—we weren’t speaking,” I cut in. “And we were always super close.”
Sarah ignored the one-up. “I was really caught up in that…that narrative. It wasn’t healthy.”
“I’m sorry, that must have been really tough for you, and I…” I zipped my thumb out, the universal sign for having gotten out of Dodge.
“Yeah, I understand. I feel like it’s all I was talking about back then, but maybe that’s just ’cause it was, like, consuming my mind.”
“What made you think it wasn’t a suicide?” I asked, a little too derisively.
“Oh my god, it was all stupid little things, in retrospect. There was the fact that I found her in her underwear—she was always so perfectly put-together, so that seemed weird.”
Right, but it was circumstantial. When we’d talked it out in those first shaken weeks, it had also seemed plausible that she wouldn’t have wanted to ruin any of the beautiful pieces in her closet; Edie had treated them like precious artifacts.
“And the gun stuff didn’t make sense to me: She was left-handed, but the gun was in her right hand, and the wound was on the right side of her face. Until a forensic expert explained to me that if she used two hands, she could’ve wound up slightly off-center and just, like, crumpled to either side.”
Jesus. She’d talked to a forensic expert? I watched as she slurped the last of her fourth martini.
“But I learned enough about criminology to figure out that there are a few loose ends in any investigation. Because that’s how life is.”
“…Unraveling,” I supplied.
She smiled. “But yeah, my parents found me an awesome therapist, and she helped me face the facts. I guess we all turned out okay.”
“We did. And you shouldn’t feel bad about dealing with it however you needed to deal with it. We were all so immature and maybe didn’t know how to…ask for help.”
“You mean like Edie.”
I’d been thinking of myself, but sure, Edie, too. What with the debt and the depression and the suicide note on her laptop. The gun pressed against her temple.
“That was some heavy shit,” I said.
She poked at her cocktail napkin. “It’s still hard for me to believe sometimes. Like, we were at the top of our game. We were having the time of our lives.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “Everyone glorifies their twenties, I guess, but for me that period was…It meant a lot.” I swallowed hard. “And then it ended. It’s nuts. Literally, we were dancing around to some stupid band just a few floors up while Edie was…”
Sarah narrowed her eyes. “Well, you weren’t.”
“What?”
“You weren’t at the concert.”
I cocked my head. “Wait, what? Of course I was.”
“You weren’t. You went home. I remember because I was mad that none of my girlfriends came with me. Can you believe that? I was mad at Edie while she was, like, committing suicide. Seriously, that took me a few thousand dollars of therapy to work through.”
I scoffed. “Christ, Sarah, of course I was there. I pregamed with you guys on the roof, and we took a bunch of shots, and then we went to the show. I went home near the end of the set.”
She was shaking her head as I spoke and her expression matched mine: that charged look when you just know, know, the other person’s remembering it wrong.
“You didn’t come to the show.” She let out a bleat of laughter. “You didn’t! We pregamed together and then you left.”
“Sarah, come on,” I snapped. “I remember that night perfectly. I was there with you guys.” The band with the weird face paint. Music so loud we were part of it, gyrating through every crashing sound wave.
“I mean, I know what I know,” she said finally, leaning back and tossing her