Don’t worry – there are no angst-filled teenage vampire here. A new moon cycle starts tonight and this song is dedicated to my life long friend. We had dinner tonight and I fear that I broke her heart. Despite having managed to maintain our friendship for decades. She was at my sixth birthday party for Christ’s sake. We have definitely had our share of rows but we have always somehow managed to pull our friendship through. A few years ago, however, she began a secret romance with my brother. They were each going through a divorce around the same time that my husband and I got married and, ironically, they began “seeing” each other at our wedding. I put quotation marks around seeing because it was a long distance relationship – she lives in Austin and he lives in Ohio (does the city matter? I mean, it is not Texas so who cares?) – so their relationship was primarily an electronic one.She eventually confessed to me that they were involved when she couldn’t get in touch with him for a few days and was freaking out and told me so that she find out whether I had heard if anything terrible had happened to him. To be fair, she was also dying to tell me because she was so over the moon about their relationship. She had a crush on my brother since we were kids and had always completely idolized him. When she told me, she said that she would stop seeing him if I wanted her to – if I wasn’t OK with it. I told her of course not. I told her that I was happy for them and I meant it. Much later on, after things started go in the shitter, I realized that her offer to stop seeing him was meaningless. She saw this as her chance to finally be a part of a family – my family. Her own family is a freaking Lifetime movie – just beyond horrific. She had always been like my sister and my mom like her surrogate mom. Being my brother’s girlfriend just made it seem all the more real for her – to her it was idyllic. A dream come true.Despite pretty much being catatonic for the first two hours after she told me, I was happy at first. LIke her, I could imagine us all spending the holidays together, taking family vacations, and getting to spend more time with my brother, which would make my poor, long-suffering mother extremely happy. But there were also dark undertones of doubt for me. I know all (or most) of her worse secrets. I’m her best friend. And now she was dating my brother?
