My life fit her perfectly, because she had spent eleven years tailoring herself to want exactly what was mine.
And yet — this is the part I can’t fully reconcile even now — I don’t think all of it was performance.
The night my father died, Delphine drove two hours in the rain to sit on my bathroom floor with me while I fell apart.
She held my hair.
She didn’t say anything wise, because there was nothing wise to say; she just stayed, all night, so I wouldn’t be alone with it.
You cannot fake that at three in the morning.
I have decided, in the years since, that the truest and most frightening thing about people like Delphine is not that their love is entirely counterfeit.
It’s that it’s real and conditional at the same time — that a person can genuinely love you and still decide, when the price is high enough, that they love your life more.
She wasn’t a monster wearing a friend’s face.
She was a friend who, offered the choice, chose the earrings.