“God,” Cali says. “Liz, er, Katie. My friend, I am so, so sorry that you went through all of this. I don’t even know what to say other than that I’m sorry for your pain.”

“That’s plenty, Cali, honestly.” Her response is as close to the right one as exists. People had done many strange things when faced with this story, which—thanks to the news coverage—everyone in our lives had been. Some offered platitudes: Whatever doesn’t kill you . . . or The darkest hour . . . Others parroted empty religious aphorisms about God’s plans, and these especially rankled me. Where was God in this story? No god I could reconcile came anywhere near something like this. “I’m just glad you don’t . . . I don’t know. I’m glad you didn’t run in the other direction.”

“Why would I? It doesn’t have anything to do with you, or I mean, it does, but none of it is your fault.”

“I know that,” I say. Do I? “Not everyone in my life back home reacted so well. Maybe things would have ended with Luke anyway, but it made it all so much worse.”

“Well, that doesn’t say much for him.”

“He just wasn’t up to it. We’d known each other since we were kids, and I’d always been one person—disciplined, positive, single-minded—and then this all happens, and I come unglued.” It all sounds so familiar to me, I realize, because this is the voice in my head, the voice that berates me and exonerates Luke day after day. “I don’t know, I just totally lost focus, I was crying all the time. I wasn’t the same person. I wasn’t what he signed up for anymore.”

Cali thinks on this for a moment. “It’s not that you weren’t you though, you were just in a crisis. And when you love someone, you’re supposed to be there for the bad as well as the good. I mean, you don’t get to just take the easy parts of a relationship, that’s not how it works.”