After I Found His Secret Reddit Confession to My Best Friend

They discharged me on a Thursday with a bag of pamphlets and a business card for a nutritionist in Murray Hill. The nurse circled the phone number twice in blue pen, like circling it harder would make me call it. I put the card in the zippered pocket of my backpack, the one where I keep things I plan to forget about.

I didn't call.

At home, the dress was still on the back of my door, size two, waiting like it had been waiting the whole time I was gone. I took it off the hanger before I even put my bag down. I don't know why. I just wanted to know.

It slid on easy. Too easy. The zipper went up without me having to hold my breath, without the little hop-and-tug I used to do with dresses that fit right. I stood in front of the mirror above my dresser and looked at myself for a long time.

I thought I'd feel something like winning. That's what I'd been chasing every morning on the Hudson, every skipped dinner, every eight hundred calories logged into a cartoon apple. I thought there'd be a flash of light, a door opening somewhere.

There wasn't. There was just a girl in a mirror, in a dress that used to be a goal and was now just fabric, looking thinner and somehow smaller in every way that mattered. I turned sideways. I turned back. Nothing in my chest lifted.

I felt like I'd won a prize I didn't want anymore, and lost something on the way to winning it that I didn't have a name for yet.

I took the dress off, folded it instead of hanging it, and put it in the bottom drawer where I wouldn't have to look at it every time I left the room.

I started the scarf that week. Cable-knit, charcoal grey, Kellan's favorite. I told myself it was a gift, which was true, and I told myself it was love, which I needed to believe more than I actually did.

Amber watched me from her bed some nights, over the top of her laptop, not saying anything. She had a way of pretending not to watch that was its own kind of watching. Once she said, "That's a lot of yarn for a guy who wears the same three sweaters on rotation."

"He'll wear it," I said.

"Sure," she said, and went back to her screen.

I worked on it most evenings, the needles clicking soft in the quiet, six weeks of stitches that were really just six weeks of me negotiating with a story I didn't want to put down yet. Every row felt like proof. Proof that I still believed in something, even if I couldn't say what.

I booked the Christmas dinner reservation myself — the West Village place, the one from our first anniversary, the one with the low lights and the bread that came with honey butter. Seven p.m., December twenty-fifth. I told Kellan the date three weeks ahead, on purpose, the way you tell someone something you want them to actually remember.

"Christmas night, seven," I said. "I already booked it."

"Perfect," he said, not looking up from his phone.

I wrote it in my planner in pen. I circled it, the way the nurse circled that phone number. Some part of me must have known already that circling things doesn't make people show up.

The week before Christmas, he got sweet again. Really sweet, the kind that used to make my whole chest go warm before I learned to ask why. He texted more. He wanted to pick out a tree, even though our dorm room barely fit a desk lamp, let alone a tree — we ended up getting a two-foot one from a bodega and he strung it with lights like it mattered. He started talking about New Year's, about a rooftop somewhere, about fireworks over the water.

I said yes to all of it. I let myself enjoy it, even though some cold, careful part of me — the part that had learned to check browser histories and count the seconds before he reached for his phone — kept waiting for the other thing. The pattern. The thing underneath the thing.

At night, under the blankets, I pulled up the Reddit post again. I had it memorized by then — *the girl with the round face and the softer body, the friend who's been out of reach for six years* — every word sitting in me like something swallowed and never digested. I read it anyway. Pressing on a bruise to make sure it still hurt, maybe. Making sure I hadn't imagined it, now that he was being kind again and kindness had a way of making memory feel unreliable.

Amber got up around three one night for water. I felt her cross the room in the dark, felt the mattress dip when she paused by my bed. I didn't move. I kept my phone under the blanket, the screen turned low, but the light must have shown through anyway, blue and small.

She didn't say anything. I heard the soft click of a glass being set down on my nightstand, and then her footsteps going back to her own bed, and then nothing.

In the morning the water was still there, untouched, a little ring of condensation on the wood. I drank it before I got up. I didn't mention it. Neither did she.