An hour and a half after I get home, I am in full Friday evening mode. I've eaten; I'm showered and dressed in my coziest pajamas, slipper socks on my feet and a candle flickering in the living room. The scent of chai apple cupcake permeates the air – a bonus of my small apartment – and mingles with my cinnamon bun body wash, and the hazelnut coffee in my hand. I'm all ready to veg out on the couch with my phone in my hand to choose the best pictures I've taken this week. My Instagram account isn't nearly as big as Kitty's and I almost never feature in the pictures I post, and I'm sure it's only because of her that I have twelve thousand followers. Only a fraction of them interact with my snaps of Boston, my artsy coffee photos and pictures of books I'm currently reading, but I have had the occasional sponsorship and a surprising amount of my mail is books that have been sent to me directly from the publisher.

The minute my butt hits the cushion, there's a knock on my door. Ugh. I didn't order food and I'm not expecting anyone. It's probably a lost delivery driver for one of the other apartments in this building and I plan to ignore it, until there's another knock and I get up with a harrumph. This had better be quick. I have a Gilmore Girls rewatch to continue. It's my comfort show: every year, when September comes around, I put on the first episode and spend the next couple months rewatching all one hundred fifty-three of them. I know each episode so well that by now it's mostly something to have on in the background while I edit photos or chat to Kitty.

I look through the peephole and all I see is brown, but I'd know that curl pattern anywhere. I fling open the door and my best friend almost falls into my living room.

"Kitty, hey," I say, greeting her with a smile. I glance out of the window to check that the sun has gone down before I say, "Shabbat shalom."

Kitty rights herself with a laugh, her curls damp and her cheeks pink as though she has walked all the way here from her place in Beacon Hill. "Sorry, missed my stop, ended up at the Museum of Fine Arts and figured I'd just walk but it's fucking disgusting out there, Jesus. God, you look comfy. Can I come in?"

I step to the side, taken aback by Kitty's sudden intrusion. Something's not right. This is the Kitty I see when something's happened, when something has flustered her or she has exciting news or she's about to drop a bombshell so I steel myself for whatever's about to come out of her mouth. And I've never known her not to return a Shabbat Shalom, even though I'm not Jewish.

"You're already in," I say. "What's going on? Did I miss a call?"

She sheds her wet coat and takes a clip from my kitchen table to hold her hair back. "No, I didn't call. Sorry, shit, I'm being such an idiot, you could've had plans."

I look down at myself. Kitty follows my gaze. We both laugh. I'm not the type to make plans for a Friday night, and if I do, those plans involve Kitty. "I was about to start Gilmore Girls. You're more than welcome to join, but I'm gonna need to know what's going on because you look kinda..." I trail off, gesturing at her face. Her unkempt curls and her rain-streaked cheeks and the wild look in her coffee-brown eyes. "Come on, Kitty. What's happened?"

Kitty unzips her boots and pulls them off by the heels. She smooths her green woolen dress over her hips. Raindrops cling to the fibers at the hem and the cowl neck where her coat didn't cover it; she has brought the scent of rain with her, fresh and earthy. "What episode?"

"Uh, Rory's dad's about to come back, I think."

"Oh, awesome, you're still on season one." She drops onto my couch and massages the balls of her feet through her thick black tights. I sit on the coffee table opposite her, blocking her view of the TV, and I put my hands on my knees. My senses are on high alert. I slip into crisis management mode.

"Kitty. Talk to me. You've turned up out of the blue and you're avoiding my questions. Something has clearly happened and you're kinda scaring me. Forget Gilmore Girls. They can wait a minute. Want a drink? And we'll talk?"

After a moment, Kitty slowly nods. I fix her a coffee with plenty of French vanilla creamer, which I only keep in my fridge for her, and sit next to her. She twists to face me and the manic look in her eyes has gone, replaced by something I can't decipher. I stare into those eyes, deeper than a well, until I've forgotten what we're doing. I snap out of it with a shake of my head. Her gaze is mesmerizing. I could waste hours searching for the line where the black of her pupil becomes the brown of her iris, a line that, in this light, is impossible to spot.

"I'm about to say three of your favorite words," she says.

"Um ... you brought wine? You have candy?" I joke. I make a few more guesses, until Kitty presses her full lips together so that her mouth is a thin, flat line and I shut myself up with a swift mental kick.

"You were right," she says.

"You do have candy?"

"No, you idiot, those are the three words." She rolls her eyes at me, an expression I know so well from her. Usually fond, often despairing.

"Okay, yeah, those words feel pretty good too," I say, taking a sip. I added a bit too much hazelnut syrup or I didn't mix it in enough; it's too sweet, enough to make me scrunch up my nose. "What am I right about?" I wrack my brains but I can't think of a disagreement we've had recently, except over petty shit like whether Starbucks' pumpkin spice latte is better than the cinnamon dolce latte. That one was settled in an instant when we went to the nearest store and ordered the entire fall menu, and it turned out we were both wrong. The apple crisp oat macchiato won.

"A lot."

"Such as...?"

Kitty drinks her coffee. Three big gulps. Pushes it across the table and sits on her hands, her gaze jumping around the room before finally meeting mine. I'm perched right on the edge of the couch, my pulse ratcheting up above one hundred from its usual seventy-five.

"You're scaring me, Kits," I say, reaching out to her. The minute my fingers graze her knee, she opens her mouth and blurts it out.

"The wedding's off."

"What?" I spill my coffee all over my lap but I don't move to clean it up. It isn't hot enough to burn, whereas Kitty's words are. "I'm sorry, what? What happened? What?"

My shock is real this time. I don't have to act. But I can't ignore the spark of something else that flickers at the back of my mind. Something like relief. Like I've been waiting for my grade on a test I thought I bombed and I just got a perfect one hundred.

"You were right," she says again. She's calmer now that the confession is out. "I didn't love ... I mean, I love Levi. He's one of my favorite people in the world and I really hope we can stay friends. But I'm not in love with him, and I've been so stressed about all this wedding stuff and I think half of it was dread because I've been trying to ignore the fact that we shouldn't be getting married."

"Oh my god, Kitty. I'm so sorry. God, fuck, I can't believe this." My mind is running a million miles a minute trying to digest what she's saying. The wedding is off. She isn't engaged anymore. She isn't in love with Levi. "When did this happen?"

I think back to this morning, joking with her in her comments. I think of her daily posts, how she interacts with her followers constantly, how I had coffee with her last week and I had no idea. Did she? When we were spending way too much money on the Starbucks fall menu, did she know that her engagement was on the rocks?

Kitty checks her watch. She has several, most of them sent to her by brands or as sponsorship deals, but the one she wears every day is the one her parents gave her when she graduated summa cum laude six years ago. It's still pristine. Kitty takes care of her stuff. I, on the other hand, had to stop wearing watches after I smashed two and lost two more.

"A couple hours ago," she says. My jaw drops. She backtracks, flapping her hands at me. "No, no, it's not like that. Not like some big bolt from the blue. It's a mutual decision. We've been talking it through all week, and now it's official. Levi's moving out tomorrow. The wedding's off. We're over."

"God, Kitty. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry." I pull her in for a hug, breathing in the perfume and petrichor of her hair. "Are you okay? Shit, sorry, that's a terrible question, of course you're not okay, ignore me. You wanna stay here tonight?"

"Yes please." She nods and her chin quivers, but she doesn't let herself cry. I see the twitch of her jaw when she clenches her teeth, a classic Kitty Cohen move: never let your true emotions show. Never let the people see you falter. Except I'm not one of the anonymous masses who follow her life online. It's me. We've been best friends for a decade. We shared a room for a year; we've shared a bed more times than I can count. She can be real in front of me. Her brain follows the same thought process, because a moment later, she lets her face crumple and she stops holding back the ugly tears.

"It's fine, really," she blubs, sniffing hard. "It's the right thing. I shouldn't be crying – I've been thinking of calling it off for a few weeks."

"That doesn't make it any less of a huge decision," I say. I hate that she's been battling with such a big decision alone, that I turned myself into someone she couldn't come to. I fucked up last year. She probably didn't want to come to me for advice, probably thought I'd leap at the chance to convince her to leave Levi.

I wouldn't have. I'm not that much of a bitch. But it would've been hard to have advocated for her to stick it out if I had the slightest feeling she wasn't one hundred percent invested in him.

I hold her for a while. She cries for a while. My heart is rent in two: one half aching for her, the other half skipping with joy. I try to suffocate the latter. This is not the time or the place for me to be rejoicing in the fact that I knew all along, from the very start, that the marriage made no sense.

"I am okay," Kitty says when we pull apart. Her eyes are red, her cheeks wet, but I believe her. "I was comfortable with Levi, you know? He moved in last year and I thought, yeah, this is okay, we can live together without any major issues and I like spending time with him, so when he proposed it was ... like, the natural progression of things?"

"I get it," I say in my most soothing tone. I don't get it, but only because my dating record is a who's who of men who bore me after a couple months. Once the initial crush wears off, I lose interest in them, the sex no longer exciting and the dates no longer fun.

"We both realized that we work better as friends. It's just such a big decision to make. I mean, ugh, calling off a whole wedding?"

"Better to call off a wedding now than to marry someone you're not in love with and end up getting divorced down the line," I point out. Kitty gives me a watery smile.

"I know. It's definitely for the best, in the long run." She runs her hands through her hair, fingers tangling in her knotted curls, made worse by the wind and rain. "I just wish it hadn't taken me this long to see. Like, how stupid am I to spend two years with a guy before figuring out that I don't even like him like that?"

"You're not stupid, Kitty, don't say that. You're one of the smartest people I know. You just have a soft heart."

She scoffs at that and sinks against me again and I hold her. We put Gilmore Girls on and lose ourself in the cozy world of Stars Hollow for an episode, then another. Kitty takes a photo of the setup – the candle, the coffees, the TV – and posts it to her Instagram story with the caption girls' night <3. We're about to start a third episode – tonight is the night for a binge – when she puts her hand over the remote and says, "I have something else to tell you."

"Please don't tell me you're pregnant with your ex-fiancé's baby and you need me to co-parent because you know I don't know what to do with babies," I say. Kitty laughs and shakes her head at me.

"God, no. I don't think so, at least. It'd have to be a miracle child seeing as I've had, like, three periods since I last had sex."

I hold up my hands and gape at her. "Hold on a sec. What? You guys haven't slept together in, what, three months?"

"More like four," Kitty says with an awkward smile. Her hair is mostly dry now, and she lets it fall in her face. "That's beside the point. We can discuss my paltry sex life another time – I need to ask you something."

"Fire away."

"So, most of the wedding stuff is at least partly refundable, or we haven't paid the final bills yet, but there's one thing that's already paid for in full that I'm going to need your help with."

"Get me a fork and I'll help you eat the cake."

"You're insufferable, you know," Kitty says. I'm well aware. Probably another major contributing factor to my romantic failures. I get bored, and no-one seems to be able to put up with me the way Kitty does.

"Sorry. What do you need help with?"

"The honeymoon," she says.

I helped plan the honeymoon. Well, actually, I planned the entire thing with Levi's guidance and Kitty's money. Nothing too outlandish, none of the cliched international destinations like the Maldives or Paris or Italy: after the wedding, Kitty and Levi were supposed to be heading off to Las Vegas for two weeks in the honeymoon suite at an all-inclusive resort on the strip, with a whole bunch of activities pre-booked to break up long days of lounging in one of the hotel's multiple pools. I booked trips to the Grand Canyon and Death Valley and more; I threw myself into the planning to make up for my reaction to the engagement, so I know every aspect of this wedding inside out.

"You want me to cancel the stuff I booked?" I ask, already getting out my phone to load up various confirmation emails to figure out who to contact. "I think most of it is refundable with at least a day or two's notice, but I'll have to che–"

"No." Kitty puts her hand on mine. "I don't want you to cancel it."

"You wanna go on your own?"

"I want you to come with me."

I snap my head up, my phone falling from my hand. "You want me to come with you? On your honeymoon?"

"I know it's a big ask and I know you might not be able to get the time off work, but if you can, it'd be pretty awesome, right?" Her eyes are brightening up, the color returning to her cheeks. "It was supposed to be a fun start to married life, but it would make one hell of an epic girls' trip. Just you and me."

"Whoa." My mind is racing and that's the only word that comes out as I jump from thought to thought. The honeymoon was supposed to start right after the wedding, which was supposed to take place about five weeks from now. That's plenty of notice to give my boss, Jason, and considering I've barely touched the unlimited PTO and my work doesn't rely on anyone else, there shouldn't be a problem. And I have been needing a break recently.

"Don't worry if you can't, seriously," Kitty says, holding out her hands in a placating gesture. "I know it's short notice and two weeks is a long time, but truth be told, I've been more excited by this trip than I was about the wedding."

"I'd love to, Kits. It's literally my dream trip – I was living vicariously through your honeymoon when I sorted it out," I say. "I'll talk to my boss on Monday. I'll make it work."

"Are you serious?" She sits straighter, her eyes widening, her plump lips parting.

"As a heart attack," I say.

"Oh my god, Fliss, are you sure?"

Jason could say no. He could tell me to pull the other one; he could laugh me out of his office for daring to ask for two entire weeks of paid leave so I can take Levi's place on his honeymoon. Or he could say yes. I'm one of his best employees. I've worked my ass off in the six years I've worked at Fox McCoy Marketing Solutions; I've brought in so many clients and generated a ton of extra business for the firm and I almost never take a break, and the five weeks between now and the honeymoon is enough time for me to wrap up or get ahead on my current projects. Even if he says no, I reckon I can change his mind.

"I'm sure," I say once I've thought it through again, and I let myself get excited about the dream trip that I never thought I'd be able to take. "Shit, Kits, this will be the most epic trip of our lives. Are you sure you want me there?"

Kitty rolls her eyes at me again and slaps my thigh. "You're my best friend, Fliss. You're, like, my favorite person in the entire world." Her cheeks go pink and she looks away for a second before she says, "Truth be told, I want you there more than I ever wanted some guy."

Some guy. She ditched her fiancé a matter of hours ago and already he is some guy.

"Maybe I'm the one you should be marrying," I tease, poking her knee. Kitty presses her lips together and slowly nods.

"Maybe, yeah."

"We could move up the deadline for our pact, if you want," I say with a chuckle. When we were twenty-one, three years into college and equally struggling to date, we got drunk on cheap, shitty wine and decided that if we were both still single by thirty-five, we'd marry each other as best friends.

"Let's see how the honeymoon goes first," Kitty says, "then we'll see if I want to marry you."

*

if your best friend called off her wedding and asked you to join her on the honeymoon, what would you say?