My own reaction to the news confused me. On the one hand, I felt relieved I hadn’t been asked to participate. On the other . . . one of my oldest friends was getting married, and he hadn’t bothered to tell me about it until the very last moment.

And he hadn’t bothered to invite me either.

As I said, we’d been by each other’s side for everything important up to that point. We’d depended on each other, just not lately.

Blake must have read the look on my face, because he jumped in to explain.

“It’s a small wedding,” he said. “We’ve planned it quickly. Sam’s mom knew someone who could get us in at that place on Deer Valley Road. You know, the Deer Valley Barn. That’s where the ceremony and the reception are going to be. They had a cancellation, so we got in.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Hey, look, we didn’t invite you because of all that stuff Amanda said about me the last time we saw each other. You can understand that, right? I mean, if Sam went off on you that way, you wouldn’t invite her to your wedding. Not that Sam ever would say those kinds of things, of course.”

I understood what he was saying. And why.

Six months earlier, not long after Henry was born, Blake had come over to the house to see the baby. When he came in, Henry was still asleep, and Blake made a grand entrance, carrying a gigantic stuffed elephant. It had taken us what felt like a long, long time to get Henry down, and Blake spoke in a booming voice that immediately woke the baby up. We were new parents, and Amanda was dealing with changes to her body—sleep deprivation, a painful breast infection, the soreness from the delivery itself—so anything might have put us both on edge. Not to mention the whirl of emotions that came with having a baby. I whispered to her that I’d get Blake out of the house in under an hour. And I almost did.

But he insisted on holding Henry.

We tried to put him off. We said Henry needed to be fed and then go to sleep. But Blake insisted, saying we were like family, that he was “Uncle Blake” since neither one of us had siblings, and it wouldn’t be right for him not to hold our baby. I said we wanted to get him back to sleep. Blake wouldn’t let it go.

Due to loyalty and years of friendship with him, I finally relented and said Blake could hold Henry if we set him up on the couch.

Amanda’s eyes turned into more than daggers. They were giant icy broadswords directed right at me.

Blake was a good friend. I thought by showing trust, by sharing with him, we’d be showing him how we really felt.