“He was like a brother to me.”

Chloe wailed the words. Literally wailed them, blowing her nose loudly into a tissue. She stood in the very front row of the church, right next to the casket.

“A brother?” I asked. My throat felt like it was full of broken glass.

“I can’t believe he’s actually gone,” she sobbed, wiping a tear and carefully ensuring her mascara didn’t smudge. She adjusted the spaghetti strap of her dress.

It was red.

A bright, skin-tight, cherry-red cocktail dress. At my husband’s funeral.

“You didn’t visit him once, Chloe,” I said. My jaw locked so hard I could feel the pulse beating in my ears.

“You know hospitals give me such terrible anxiety,” she sniffled, stepping forward to wrap her arms around me. She smelled like expensive vodka and heavy floral perfume. “I just couldn’t bear to see him like that. But I’m here for you now, babe. I promise.”

I didn’t hug her back. I let my arms hang completely dead at my sides. My chest went entirely numb.

Let me back up. Let me confess something awful. I enabled Chloe for fifteen years. I was the quiet, boring friend who let the loud, beautiful friend take all the oxygen in the room. I let her make every conversation about herself. I thought it was just her personality. I thought she still loved me. I was a desperate, pathetic idiot.

Then nine months ago, my husband David was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer.

Everything stopped. My entire world shrank to the size of a hospital room, and then to the size of our bedroom when they finally sent him home on hospice.

For nine months, I didn’t sleep for more than three hours at a time. I washed soiled bed sheets at 3 AM while he cried from the pain. I fed him ice chips. I kept a spiral-bound notebook on the nightstand where I logged his morphine doses. Every four hours. Exactly on the hour. The notebook was stained with coffee rings and tears. I watched a vibrant, laughing, 200-pound man turn into a skeleton who couldn’t remember my name half the time.

And for nine months, my “best friend” Chloe vanished.

“I need you,” I texted her in month two, sitting on the bathroom floor. “Can you just come sit with me for an hour?”