We didn't make the evening into a celebration of Marissa's regret. We washed the cups, argued about whether the windows should be opened despite the cold, and watched a documentary neither of us finished because Sarah fell asleep halfway through. I covered her with a blanket and looked around the small apartment I'd once been afraid to rent. The quiet felt like something I'd built rather than something I'd been left with.
Over the next few weeks, the last details of the old group reached me through ordinary conversations rather than dramatic updates. Adrien and Emma were planning a modest wedding and had become busy with all the practical work that involved. Khloe loved Portland, had found people through her job, and was talking about volunteering at a community garden near her apartment. Tasha and Finn were still together and were learning to spend time as a couple without consulting everyone else about every decision.
Jake said the squad chat had become mostly photographs, birthday wishes, and occasional plans that people attended when they could. Marissa still suggested gatherings sometimes and sometimes seemed disappointed when people couldn't make them. But there were signs she was learning not to interpret every absence as a personal rejection. Whether the group would remain close in some new form was their business, and I realized I was no longer waiting to find out.
I thought about how easily I had begun treating the whole situation as a morality tale while I was still hurting. If Marissa's friends stopped being available, it was tempting to call that justice, as if her loneliness could balance mine. But people were not punishments assigned to one another, and the changes in their lives weren't evidence that I was morally superior. They were evidence that adulthood kept moving, whether or not a group chat was ready for it.
There was also a part of me that remained grateful for what the relationship had been before it stopped working. Marissa had made me more willing to try unfamiliar things and more comfortable speaking in rooms where I used to stay quiet. She had loved me in ways I didn't need to deny, even though she hadn't been able to love me in the consistent, attentive way I wanted from a partner. Leaving meant accepting both truths without forcing one to cancel the other.
Sarah and I took the coastal trip the following month. We left after breakfast on a Saturday, stopped at a roadside market for fruit, and drove with the windows open whenever the weather allowed. At the small hotel, the room overlooked a harbor where fishing boats moved slowly between piers. We walked for hours, bought postcards we'd probably forget to mail, and ate dinner at the seafood place she'd been telling me about since we met.