All I remember was that she and Spencer had broken up, for perhaps the millionth time since the spring. It was just after our graduation, so Amaya and I had rented out a new apartment. She was supposed to be starting her internship right away, but I was moving to Chicago in two months to work at J.P. Morgan. I remember feeling scared. It was the first time we would be well and truly apart. I was different then. Fearful, timid, afraid of my own shadow.

She’d asked me not to tell Spencer where we’d moved to. I wasn’t, under any circumstances, supposed to give him our new address. But he’d shown up when I was returning my cap and gown, and he was just so heartbroken, and they had already ended things and gotten back together so many times that I just caved and gave it to him.

I’d returned home a few hours later to find a livid Amaya storming out of the building. She screamed at me that I’d chosen him over her and left. I didn’t understand. I’d just been trying to help her.

I didn’t see or hear from her again until she showed up at my house.

Did she have every right to be mad at me? Sure, I guess. I didn’t know what went down with Spencer, of course. Had something happened? Something bad? At the time, I never thought it was possible. Spencer was everyone’s hero. He was the only guy who hung out with us on girls’ nights. He was our designated driver. Our bodyguard when we got too much attention at a club. He’d treated Amaya like a heroine from a romance novel. He was a good guy.

He was a good guy to me, too, until he wasn’t.

“Ams? You okay? You’re not leaving, are you?”

She nodded.

I should have just said it. That I wanted her to stay. Instead we had some rubbish back-and-forth about my mother bugging her and her insisting that she was tired.

That was until she blurted out that I can’t marry Spencer.

But it wasn’t what she said. It was the way she said it.

So much entitlement.

For years growing up I was stunted in Amaya’s shadow. She always got what she wanted. She was bossy, sure, way before it was politically incorrect to call women bossy. But she used to order me around. Tell me what to do. I spent so much time and energy trying not to upset her. She was fearless back then. She’d taken the fall for me, too, sometimes—when I thought I was in love with a teacher at school and she pretended like she was the one dating him to discourage gossip and I could spend time with him. At the time I thought she was being my friend. Now I knew that she was using my mistakes to control me.

And here she was, telling me what to do again.

“You can’t marry him, Kaavi. I was with him for four years, okay? You can’t marry him.”