The First Draft

“You die, I die,” I say, as if repeating it might correct the math. The room goes quiet in the wrong way. A few people shift. Someone clears their throat. Her husband looks down at his hands.

It used to be funny.

Five hours earlier I’d been in a dim bar in New York, halfway through my third glass of red wine, listening to a first date explain his finance career like it was a personality trait. I remember nodding, pretending to care, thinking this was not how I pictured my late thirties.

Now I’m here.

I unlock her front door and step into the dark. The house smells like lemon cleaner and something faintly floral. I don’t turn on the lights. I know this place by memory. I walk straight to the bedroom, open the closet door, and sit on the carpet in the middle of her walk-in like I’ve done a hundred times before.

The clothes are arranged by color, light to dark. Shoes lined up in pairs, heels by height. Wooden hangers we once argued over because plastic felt cheap and she said if we were going to be adults, we needed adult hangers.

We were twelve when we first sketched our “future houses” in spiral notebooks. Hers always had kids. Mine had windows and space and no one depending on me.

We sat cross-legged on her bedroom floor with gel pens and construction paper, arguing about whether the kitchens needed islands. She insisted on a long farmhouse table. I said I didn’t want anyone at mine long enough to need one. She rolled her eyes and drew a dog in the yard anyway, like she could override me in ink. We wrote our future last names in bubble letters. We crossed them out. We rewrote them. We did not consider the possibility that one of us would not get to grow old inside the house we were designing.

For fifteen years it was FaceTime and voice notes and “Next trip is on me.” Dressing room photos. Mirror selfies before date nights. Texts that said, Does this make me look pregnant? followed by laughing emojis and three alternate outfit options. I have screenshots of her life saved in my phone like receipts.

I scroll now and find the green dress she wore to her anniversary dinner. The one she almost returned because it felt “too young.” It’s hanging three feet from me.

I press my thumb into the fabric like it might still hold her shape.

I pull the dress off the hanger and hold it against my chest. It smells faintly like her perfume. For a second, I imagine folding it into my suitcase. There are so many people in this house. So many coats and casseroles and noise. No one would notice one missing dress.

I almost fold it. I almost don’t stop.

The front door opens.

I freeze.

Her daughter stands in the doorway of the closet, her face swollen from crying. For a second she looks eight years old again.

I hold up the dress. “Do you think she’d like this one?”

She nods. “It’s perfect.”

She reaches for the hanger and our hands touch. Her fingers are cold. She doesn’t pull away first. For a second, I feel like I am being evaluated. Like she is deciding what I am to her mother. I want to say I was here before all of you. I want to say I helped build this house in conversations that happened long before it had walls. Instead, I let go of the dress. She carries it out of the closet like it belongs to her. It does.

The days blur. Flowers. Black fabric. People speaking in careful voices.

At the funeral, her husband speaks first.

“I’ve loved growing old with her,” he says. “But no one here loved growing up with her quite like her soulmate.”

The room shifts.

I used to think that word belonged to us. I still do.

He gets to say it because he married her. Because there are children and joint bank accounts and a mortgage that still has both their names on it.

He will be called widower. People will look at him and know what to do.

They will not look at me.

I will be called friend.

I don’t know if he means soulmate the way we did. I don’t know if he ever could.

He loved who she became.

I loved who she was before that.

I am afraid that when people tell her story, they will start it at the wedding.

There were years I hoped they would fight. Nothing catastrophic. Just enough for her to need me more. I never said that out loud. I barely admitted it to myself. But it was there.

That’s my cue.

I stand. The walk to the podium feels longer than it is.

“You die, I die,” I say again.

The words land wrong in a room like this.

We stole it after binge-watching television in our thirties, wine-drunk and dramatic. We’d say it every time one of us had a bad date or a bad haircut or a minor inconvenience that felt catastrophic.

We used to draw our future houses in spiral notebooks. She’d sketch a yard full of stick-figure kids and a kitchen table that somehow seated twelve. I drew skylines with too many windows and no curtains. We both got what we drew.

What we didn’t draw was this.

There are entire versions of my life that don’t exist without her. I don’t know who I am in the next one. She’s the only person who remembers the first draft.

Everyone else still has a role. Wife. Mother. Parent. Child.

Mine—

Mine expired. I am the person who remembers. I don’t know what that makes me.

“You were supposed to outlive me,” I say.

“That was—”

I laugh. It scrapes out of me.

“That was the deal.”

Later, I slip back into the closet. The hangers are still even. The shoes still aligned.

This was never my home.

Because she was my home.

“You die, I die.”

I am still here.