My first weekend as an employee of Blackwood Press was a strange country of calm. There was no frantic scramble to finish a freelance project, no looming dread of a dwindling bank account. There was just time. Quiet, empty, and all my own. It was the perfect environment for an archaeologist to begin her dig.
The work couldn't start with memory alone; memory is a notoriously unreliable narrator. I needed artifacts. I found my starting point in a large, cloth-bound scrapbook tucked away with my college yearbooks. We had called it our "Project Book." It was a chaotic, living document of our friendship.
I opened it on the living room floor, the pages stiff with age. The first few entries were an explosion of youthful optimism. A ticket stub from the first movie we saw together. A photo of us on the steps of our university, captioned in Sera's dramatic scrawl: "Year One: The Architects Arrive." Every page was filled with "we," "us," and "our." Our plans to start a design firm. Our list of cities we would travel to. Our pact to never let a guy come between us—a promise whose irony now felt like a physical weight.
I saw the evidence of a true partnership, a bond forged in shared dreams and cheap instant coffee. We were equals then. Two builders, drawing a blueprint for the future, side-by-side. I smiled, a genuine, wistful smile. It was good to remember that the foundation had been strong once.
My mission was to find the first crack. Not the big, shattering fracture that Liam's arrival had caused, but the first, almost invisible hairline crack that had weakened the structure long before. I turned the pages slowly, my eyes scanning not just the happy mementos, but the spaces in between, the subtext I had ignored at the time.
I found it on page seventeen.
The page was dedicated to the "InnovateU Design Challenge," a university-wide competition we had entered as a team in our sophomore year. There was a photo of our project model, a sleek, ambitious concept for a modular public seating system. Pasted next to it was the blue ribbon for third place. The initial notes were scrawled in my neat print and Sera's looping cursive, a brainstorm of "our idea."
But as I looked at the ribbon, a specific memory surfaced, sharp and clear. I remembered the presentation day. Our project was brilliant, but it was complex. I knew every technical detail, every material specification. Sera knew how to sell it. "You're the brains, I'm the mouth," she had joked, and I had readily agreed, relieved to avoid the terror of public speaking.
She was magnificent on stage. She charmed the judges, her passion and energy making our project sound like the most revolutionary idea in the world. When they announced the winners, they called out, "Third place, for her innovative urban seating concept, Seraphina Vance!"
Her concept.
I remembered the flicker of confusion, quickly suppressed. I was standing in the wings, and she was on stage, accepting the handshake and the ribbon, bathing in the applause. Later, she'd rushed over, hugging me tightly. "We did it!" she'd whispered, pressing the ribbon into my hand. Her use of "we" had been enough for me then. I told myself it didn't matter. We were a team. A win for her was a win for us. I was proud of her, and proud of the work we had done.
But now, sitting on my floor years later, I saw it for what it was. It was the first time our roles were publicly defined and accepted. She became the face, the voice, the named creator. I became the silent partner, the brilliant-but-invisible force behind the curtain. And I had let it happen. I had been complicit. My relief at avoiding the spotlight was a tacit agreement to stand in her shadow.
It wasn't a malicious act on her part, I realized. She wasn't trying to steal the credit. She was simply stepping into a role she was made for, and I was stepping into one that felt safe. But the agreement was made. The dynamic was set. The foundation shifted from a partnership of equals to a hierarchy.
I traced the edge of the faded blue ribbon still taped to the page. The end of our friendship didn't start with a betrayal. It started with a compromise. It started with my silence. The great collapse didn't begin with a man. It began with a stage, a ribbon, and my willing retreat into the comfortable, quiet, and ultimately powerless role of the one behind the scenes.
I gently closed the scrapbook. The quiet in my apartment felt heavier now, filled not with the ghosts of a friend's actions, but with the weight of my own. This excavation was going to be harder than I thought. It required me to look at the ruins and admit that I had handed someone else the chisel that would eventually bring it all down.