2

AMAYA

Three Months before the Wedding

“What’s that you got there?” Jessica asked, eyeing my phone.

We were sitting in the LA sun, sipping mimosas at Bella’s Bistro while waiting for our eggs to come. It’s a beautiful day, and I shouldn’t be on my phone. I shouldn’t have come at all. It’s been two days since I found out, and to say I’m a blubbering mess is the understatement of the year.

I didn’t even stay the night at the hotel. I called for the car and left as soon as I could. I needed to get to my laptop. Combing through Kaavi’s social media feeds on my phone wasn’t going to cut it.

I spent the rest of the night and most of the next day checking each of her posts for a hint of a relationship with him. For a sign on when they got together. For a crumb of anything at all that didn’t leave me feeling like my life was spinning out of control.

I pushed aside the questions that kept buzzing through my head—

Had they always kept in touch?

How long had they been together?

Could they have gotten together when Spencer and I were still dating?

And the worst question of all—

Was there always a spark? A spark of something that I had missed because I worshipped the ground he walked on and she was like family to me?

It was late the next day when I got a few answers, but it wasn’t from digging through her older posts. I got notifications on all my accounts that Kaavi had uploaded a video to her YouTube channel.

My fingers trembled as I hit the play button. It had already racked up over a hundred views in the few minutes it was online—127, to be exact. It wasn’t going to be good. Even the numbers weren’t on my side.

She was sitting in her minimalist, rose gold–accented office.

The future is female, a poster behind her read. Her hair was flawless, as always. I have no idea how she kept it so sleek and neat, but then again, nothing about me has ever been sleek or neat, so it’s not like I could relate. And, also as always, she was radiant. She usually included the makeup she wore in her videos with links to buy. I had bought every single product in her ensemble. The scrubs and exfoliators and “natural finish” tinted moisturizers. But never, not once, did my skin manage to look like hers.

She was wearing a dusty-pink silk blouse, which matched the aesthetic of her office. She always matched the aesthetic of her office. Every Instagram post, every YouTube video, every picture on Facebook had some sort of filter on it that made it bright and light, with hints of pink and rose gold, of course. She was nothing like the shy girl I grew up with who mostly wore oversize men’s shirts and was obsessed with Bruce Springsteen.