I believed the three of us were building toward something, and that when the time came, Gabriel would turn to me, and it would simply be understood.

I was seventeen, and I was certain, and I was, as it turned out, both completely wrong and closer to the truth than I could have possibly stood to know.

I have come to think that there is a particular kind of blindness that afflicts us about the people we are closest to, a blindness born precisely of closeness, and I was deep inside it at seventeen.

Because I saw Gabriel every single day, because he had been a fixture of my life since childhood, I believed I knew him completely, knew the whole of him, and so I read his every gesture through the lens of what I already believed to be true, which was that he and I were building toward each other.