Something about seeing Dana and Tonya in matching outfits pushed Alice past the point where she could just sit idly by and watch her best friend make this huge mistake. She only meant to tell Dana that marrying Tonya was a mistake. Alice started the drive to Dana’s ready to give her friend the talking to, she though she needed. But something changed during that drive. She has tried since to capture what exactly it was that changed or caused the change, but Alice was never really able to fully understand it. All she knew for sure was that by the time she was at Dana’s doorstep, her world had changed and it wasn’t just about making a mistake with Tonya, it was about the two of them. Once she had acknowledged that, nothing else was the same.

It’s such a cliché for best friends to fall in love. There is such a debate about whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing. Wow, did their relationship showed both sides of that argument. There was such love. It was so strong and so deep, that it altered them. They had experienced something they never had before, and so had to be changed by it. Alice more so than Dana. It was new to her, so new to be so loved that she couldn’t trust it. She kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. In her experience, it always did. Dana tried to hold on to it, but it was getting harder and harder. She loved Alice so much, but she felt that on some level her love was hurting Alice and that wasn’t something she ever wanted to do.

When their idyllic world crashed in on them, they spent months barely speaking, with Alice acting like a person she never knew she had the capacity to be. They wasted months, because they were always in each other’s lives so what would one more day of not talking really do. There was always tomorrow.

Now Alice was waking up in Dana’s hospital room, watching her skin get paler, then yellow and now ashen. She looked at the woman lying in the bed and saw a shell of the strong, virulent athlete she has known. The tears that Alice had gotten so used to started to fall again. She got up and walked into the hallway to catch her breath. She didn’t want Dana to hear her cry.

She leaned against the wall, let herself fall to a crouching position and cried. She was crying for quite q while when she heard a lot of beeps and then saw the doctors running into Dana’s room. She scrambled to her feet and rushed to Dana’s room, where the nurses softly pushed her from the room and closed the door.

Alice spent the next few minutes, pushed up against the door, willing things to be ok. After what felt like a lifetime the morning nurse, was the first to come out of the room. Alice looked at her, her eyes pleading.

“I’m so sorry. Her body was just too tired to keep fighting.”

“No…no…”

“She went peacefully, painlessly. I’m really sorry Alice.”

“No, please. No.” The nurse put her arms around Alice, hugged her and didn’t let go until Alice finally stopped crying.

The next few days were a blur for Alice. She couldn’t remember how she got home from the hospital or how she told Dana’s parents. The funeral was too much for Alice, it was too real and too sad. The reality that she would never see Dana, talk to Dana or touch Dana again was just too much. At some point during the day, Shane had given her a sleeping pill and she had just drifted off into a dreamless sleep.

—

Alice woke up with a start, shooting up looking around the room, trying to gain her bearings. It took a moment to realize that she was in her own bed, in her apartment. She felt tears on her face and wiped them away. When she looked down at her pillow and saw that it was tear stained.

Her phone was ringing and she realized that it must have been what had woken her so quickly.

She answered the phone and her face fell when she heard the voice on the other end. “Dana?”