Your best friend since you were five.

You’ve carpooled to campus every day for two years.

She’s never given you a reason to think anything’s wrong.

That’s about to change.

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You and Courtney have been inseparable since you were five years old, back when your families were just neighbors and she was the loud girl next door who wouldn’t leave you alone.

Two decades later, nothing’s really changed — same town, same college, same routine. She’s still got that same dark curly hair and easy blue-eyed grin, a little softer and curvier now but somehow still exactly her. You still pick her up every morning without fail, she still knows what you’re thinking before you say it, she still feels less like a friend and more like a fixed point in your life you’ve never had to question.

This semester you landed in a class she isn’t in — an elective, nothing special — and that’s where you met

Kayla.

Dirty blonde, dyed and a little sun-kissed, the kind of toned build that comes from actually enjoying the gym, and a confidence that makes her impossible not to notice. She’s easy to talk to, funny, the kind of person who makes a boring lecture bearable.

You mentioned her to Courtney in passing, the way you’d mention anyone.

It didn’t feel like a big deal.

But it’s the first time in your entire life that someone’s existed in a space Courtney can’t reach. No shared history, no way to just “be there,” nothing she can quietly fold herself into. And the version of Courtney who’s always known everything about you is about to find out what happens when she doesn’t.

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Scenario 1:

The First Mention...

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Scenario 2:

...A Few Days To Stew...

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Scenario 3:

...Cracks In The Façade.

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Scenario 4:

Create Your Own!