“Sean, I hate seeing you like this.”

I grunt, but that’s it. I mean, what am I supposed to say? I can’t help how I feel. I can’t help thinking the universe played a cruel joke on me, sending the most magical person I’ve ever met into my life before taking them away.

Kavya stands there, using her trick of staying quiet, hoping I’ll fill the silence. But it’s not going to work this time. I’m too numb for any awkwardness to register. For the first time, my silence is making her awkward, and it eventually becomes too much for her to bear.

“Okay, well, while I have your attention, I have some bad news and you’re not gonna like it.” Kavya actually looks nervous, which she never ever ever does. If she was a nervous person, we’d never get impromptu performances about banana hammocks. The way she fidgets is so out of character, it finally gets me to speak.

“What is it?”

“Bob, that merperson who was with Ross?”

“Yes, I’m a million times more aware of them than I want to be, K,” I snap.

She swallows nervously, takes a deep breath, then launches into an explanation. “I’d been texting them for a long time before you saw them. They saw my #Fishing video of Ross, and I convinced them to come to LA once they’d saved some baby’s life or whatever, and they hung around waiting for me to give them the go-ahead to spend time with Ross. It’s just that I didn’t want Ross to choose you over going back home because I thought it would make them depressed like my mom, but I realized my mom just is depressed and nothing caused it and I messed up big, big, big-time.”

They say right before a tsunami hits that it’s eerily quiet. The water gets pulled back into the massive wave way offshore, so you don’t hear the tide lapping up the beach, and only the birds know it’s coming as they fly out of there fast. People are just left in a blissful quiet until bam. The tsunami hits, and it’s destruction everywhere.

That’s how it is now.

A few tense moments of nothing but silence before I finally yell, “WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK, KAVYA?”

I’ll at least give it to her that she doesn’t get defensive. “I know what I did was so, so bad. But I think I might have a way to make it better?”

Now she’s just pouring salt in the wound. “How? Have you figured out some way to make them stay on land? To stop time?”

“No,” she says. “But they want to do something for you. Ross wants to give you the ending you deserve before they have to go.”