This isn't fair, he would think in those moments. This isn't friendship. It's something, but it's not friendship. He felt he had been hustled into a game of complicity, one he never intended to play.

He had never done it before, and so he had no real understanding of how slow, and sad, and difficult it was to end a friendship.

The previous Friday, Andy had come over, and they'd told him, and Andy had stood and hugged them both very solemnly, as if he was Jude's father and they had told him that they had just gotten engaged.

I was aware that I had been looking for him on every street, in every crowd.

He will be someone who is defined, first and always, by what he is missing.

But they're your parents," Malcolm said to him once a year or so. "You can't just stop talking to them." But you could, and you did: he was proof of that. It was like any relationship, he felt—it took constant pruning, and dedication, and vigilance, and if neither party wanted to make the effort, why wouldn't it wither?