Chapter 3: What Diane Kept
Her name was Diane, and she was three years older than Noah and had always been the kind of person who remembered everything.
She was still in her bridesmaid dress.
Her bouquet was gone.
In her right hand she held a small notebook — pale blue, water-stained at the corner, the spiral binding bent almost flat.
I knew exactly what it was.
My stomach dropped to the floor.
"Where did you find that?" I said.
"Mom's attic." Diane stepped inside and let the door close behind her.
She didn't look at me.
She looked at Noah.
"I found it two weeks ago when I was helping her clear boxes.
I almost threw it away.
Then I read the first page."
Noah hadn't moved.
"What is it?"
"It's hers." Diane held it out toward him.
"Three years of it.
Starting when she was seventeen."
Noah looked at the notebook.
Then at me.
Then back at the notebook.
He didn't take it.
"Diane," I said carefully.
"You don't have to—"
"Yes I do." Her voice was steady but her hand wasn't.
"Because he's sitting on the floor of his own wedding believing a lie, and I've been carrying this for two weeks trying to decide whether to say anything, and I can't watch him walk away from you because nobody told him the truth."
The room was very quiet.
Noah said, "What truth?"
Diane set the notebook on the counter beside the mirror.
She opened it to a page near the middle.
She didn't read from it.
She just turned it so he could see the handwriting.
He leaned forward.
His eyes moved across the page.
His expression didn't change, but something behind it did — something shifted the way ice shifts before it cracks.
"That's your handwriting," he said.
"Yes."
"This is dated—" He stopped.
Looked up.
"You were eighteen here."
"Seventeen when I started.
Eighteen when I wrote that entry."
He read it again.
Slower this time.
I knew what that page said.
I didn't need to read it.
I had written it after the night of his nineteenth birthday, when he'd fallen asleep on my couch and I'd sat in the chair across from him for an hour unable to move, unable to explain to myself why I didn't want to go home.
I had written: *I don't know what this is.
I only know I don't want to be anywhere he isn't.
I don't know how to say that to anyone, least of all him.*
Noah closed the notebook.
He sat with it in his hands for a long moment.
"Why didn't you say anything?" he asked.
His voice was different now.
Not cracked.
Not angry.
Just quiet in a way that meant he was trying to hold something together.
"Because you were my best friend," I said.
"And I was terrified that if I said it and you didn't feel the same way, I'd lose you.
And losing you was the one thing I couldn't survive."
He looked at the notebook again.
"I felt the same way," he said.
"Since we were seventeen.
Maybe before."
The words landed in the room like something physical.
"Then why didn't *you* say anything?" I asked.
He let out a breath that wasn't quite a laugh.
"Because you were the one person in my life who never looked at me like I was something to manage.
If I told you and it changed things—" He stopped.
"I couldn't risk it either."
Diane sat down on the small bench by the door.
She pressed her hands together in her lap and said nothing.
Outside, in the hallway, we could hear my mother's voice again — lower now, talking to someone.
Then a man's voice answering.
My father, probably, trying to calm her down.
Noah looked at the door.
"She's not going to stop," he said.
"I know."
"She's going to make a scene."
"She already has."
He was quiet for a moment.
Then he reached up and straightened his tie.
It was such a small, deliberate thing.
His fingers working the knot into place.
His chin lifting slightly.
Diane watched him.
Her eyes went bright.
"Noah," I said.
"Give me a minute," he said.
Not to stop me.
Just to finish what he was doing.
He stood up from the floor.
Smoothed the front of his jacket.
Picked up the notebook and held it out to me.
I took it.
"Tell me one thing," he said.
"Not from the notebook.
From right now.
Look at me and tell me."
I looked at him.
Directly.
Without flinching.
"I love you," I said.
"I have loved you for twelve years.
I am not here because of a pact.
I am here because there is no version of my life that makes sense without you in it."
May you like
He held my gaze for a long moment.
Then the door opened again — and this time it was my mother, and she wasn't alone.
