The Night He Said No One

Now

Brody and Kenzie have been married a little over two years now.

They bought the house in Hickman. They have a yellow lab named Banjo and a garden in the backyard that Kenzie posts about too much. Last spring she started a little side business making custom dog collars, and Brody built her a workbench in the garage for it. In the pictures, they always look like they’re in on the same joke.

Brody and I are fine. Not close the way we were. We text on birthdays. When we see each other at Ryan’s, which happens a few times a year now, he claps me on the back and asks about my job and means it. He has never brought up Memorial Day again. Neither have I.

Kenzie is nice to me every time. Every single time.

I still think about it more than I want to.

I think about the version where I told her that first June, while the flowers from the airport were still on her counter. Maybe she leaves him. Maybe she’s married to someone else now, someone who never said “no one” while she was on the other end of the phone. Maybe she’s happier. Maybe she isn’t.

I think about the version where Brody lied to me at that brewery, scratching that dog’s ears with wet eyes, and every good day in that house in Hickman is built on something she doesn’t know.

And I think about the version where he told the truth. Where she sat at her sister’s in Fort Collins for two weeks and cried and decided that six months of the man she loved was worth more than one night he couldn’t take back. Where she forgave him with her eyes open. Where, when she stood up at her wedding and called him honest, she meant he was honest with her when it counted, and she was telling him, in front of everyone, that she was choosing him anyway.

I hope it’s that one.

I really do.

People have told me I should have said something. People have told me I did the right thing. I’ve gone back and forth on it a hundred times. Here’s where I always land: I wasn’t her friend. I was his. I was the one person who could confirm every piece of it, and he was the person who had just thrown me out of my home. Anything I said would have come from the worst moment of my life, aimed at the best moment of hers.

It didn’t feel like my place.

But I never deleted the screenshots. Two of them. A blue dot on Pine Street in Bennet at 2:31 in the morning, and the same dot pulling away at 6:41.

They’re still in my phone, a few hundred pictures above the one Kenzie posted that first summer, of the airport flowers on her counter, with the caption about how lucky she was.

Every once in a while, I scroll past both of them.