The Door I Locked

Chapter Seven: The Invitation

It arrived the ordinary way good news and bad news both arrive now — buried in an inbox between a supplier contract and a calendar reminder, a subject line that gave nothing away. Theo & Priya are getting married!

I actually smiled before I understood what I was looking at. Theo had been a fixture of that whole era of my life, one of the few people who'd stayed a real friend to both of us afterward, refusing on some quiet principle of his own to pick a side the rest of our friend group had felt obligated to choose. He'd introduced me to three different jobs over the years out of pure loyalty and never once, in seven years, said Julian's name to me unless I said it first. I loved him for that. I still do.

I opened the invitation expecting warmth, and mostly, that's what I got — a save-the-date in soft gold lettering, a venue two hours outside the city, a note in Theo's own handwriting at the bottom telling me he couldn't imagine the day without me there. It took me a full thirty seconds, reading and re-reading the guest logistics further down the page, to understand what should have been obvious from the very beginning.

Of course Julian would be invited. Theo had never stopped being his friend either. I don't know what I'd imagined — that time and civility would somehow have engineered a version of this wedding where I got Theo entirely to myself. It was a foolish, childish thing to have assumed, and I sat at my desk feeling foolish and childish for a good ten minutes before I made myself stop.

I called Sofia that night, mostly because I needed to say the sentence out loud to someone who'd understand exactly how much weight it carried. "Julian's going to be at Theo's wedding."

There was a pause on the other end, the kind Sofia has always been good at, the kind that tells you she's actually thinking instead of just reacting. "Are you going to go?"

"Of course I'm going. It's Theo."

"That's not what I asked."

I didn't have a good answer for what she actually asked, so I changed the subject, and she let me, because that's a particular kindness Sofia has always extended me — she'll push exactly once, and then she'll wait until I'm ready to push myself.

I thought about it for longer than I want to admit. There was a version of that week where I drafted, in my head, an elegant excuse — a business trip I could invent or accelerate, a conflict no one would question. I am, after all, someone whose schedule genuinely doesn't have room for everything; it would have been the easiest lie I ever told, because it would barely have been a lie at all.

But somewhere underneath the excuse-drafting, a different, more stubborn part of me was doing its own math. Seven years. A company. A life I'd built brick by brick specifically so that a boy under a library awning couldn't take anything else from me. If I skipped Theo's wedding — if I let the mere fact of Julian's attendance rearrange plans I'd otherwise have made without a second thought — what exactly had all those years of armor been for? What was the actual, practical use of everything I'd built, if it still couldn't survive being in the same room as him for one evening?

I told myself that's what decided it. Pride, mostly, dressed up as strength. I'm not sure, even now, that there's a real difference between the two — or whether it matters, in the end, which one gets you through the door.

I RSVP'd yes before I could talk myself out of it a second time. Then I sat with my phone in my hand for a long time afterward, staring at nothing, feeling the particular vertigo of having just agreed to stand in a room with the person who had once, on a rooftop, told me he was going to marry me — and meant something else entirely, in the end, by staying.