For a while, they did. Our apartment became a comfortable place to return to after work, even when five pairs of shoes occupied the entryway and somebody had claimed the living room for a movie marathon. I got used to finding leftover takeout in the fridge and hearing Marissa's laugh through the door when I came home. Sometimes I joined them, sometimes I retreated to the office with my headphones, and neither option seemed to bother anybody.
Then something changed in the way I was included. Plans stopped being invitations and became announcements, as if the group had acquired standing permission to occupy our time. Marissa would tell me on Thursday that we'd be hosting everybody on Saturday, even when we'd talked about driving to see my parents. If I said we had other plans, she would sound startled that I thought the plans she'd made with me could compete with a group decision.
The first real argument was over a Sunday trip to visit my mother. She had been recovering from a minor procedure and wanted to show us the new vegetable garden my father had helped her plant. Marissa promised she'd come, then announced Saturday night that Finn needed company because the person he was dating had stopped answering his messages. I asked whether she could see Finn after we got home or call him from the car, and she accused me of making her choose between people who mattered.
I went to my parents' house alone. My mother pretended not to notice, though she had set a second place at the table and placed Marissa's favorite lemonade in the refrigerator. I told her Marissa had a scheduling conflict, and Mom accepted the answer with a gentleness that made me feel worse. On the way home I rehearsed a conversation about reliability, but when I returned, Marissa was asleep on the couch with her head on my shoulder within minutes.
That tenderness was real, which made the larger problem harder to describe. She still kissed me goodbye before work, remembered how I liked my coffee, and could make me laugh when I wanted to be difficult. We still had our private language, the names we gave things nobody else would understand, and the quiet comfort of someone bringing you a blanket without asking. I kept holding those moments up against the rest, hoping one side of the scale would eventually become heavier.
Instead, I began doing little calculations I hated myself for making. How many dinners had we eaten together without another person dropping in, how many times had she called me because she missed me instead of because somebody needed a ride, how often had my plans survived the arrival of a group notification? I wasn't trying to prove I was a victim. I was trying to determine whether the feeling of being an afterthought had a basis in things that actually happened.
It did, and the evidence came from some of the days I would have least expected her to forget. When I completed my master's program, I imagined her somewhere in the audience as I crossed the stage, waving enthusiastically enough to embarrass me. My father had driven three hours, my mother had brought a card with an absurd amount of glitter, and my younger brother kept taking crooked photographs. Marissa texted that morning to say Adrien's housewarming had been moved earlier and she didn't want to miss it.