Chapter 26
There Are Two Sides to Every Story
I died with my shoes off. I woke up just the same. As I followed my caseworker through the long hallway, feeling the plush turquoise shag carpet under my feet, I knew this had to be hell.
It wasn’t a surprise.
I think part of me always knew I’d end up here someday.
I was never a spiritual man, but my mom was a devout Catholic.
In my experience, a person can never quite escape the effects of such an upbringing.
No matter how many times I called myself an atheist, in my most desperate moments, I still turned to God, at least within the quiet confines of my own mind.
Mom went just a few years before I did, and in the months following, I silently prayed to a god I didn’t believe in. Most of my life I hoped I was right to believe there was no such thing as an afterlife, as a soul.
I knew if there was, I didn’t stand a chance.
But then she was gone, and I couldn’t imagine it. I couldn’t imagine a world where she wasn’t.
So I prayed.
Not for anything in particular, I just… prayed and hoped someone somewhere could hear me.
It wasn’t the first time I’d done that. In fact, the first time I remember praying just for the existence of something after death was over twenty years earlier.
Josephina Vasquez died on November 6, 2026.
I learned about her death the following day, via an Instagram story, of all things.
No one thought to call and tell me directly.
Of course they wouldn’t. As far as anyone else knew, we were casual acquaintances at most. The truth was a secret kept between the two of us.
On November 7, that secret was mine and mine alone.
Ellie cried the hardest at her funeral, his sobs loud and dramatic in a way my bitter mind wanted to call performative.
I helped him compose himself, and we walked up to Joey’s family and offered our condolences.
It felt strange speaking trite, empty words to these people I’d never met, people who were in the throes of a grief so deep I couldn’t even imagine.
Speaking to them made me even more resentful of Ellie’s open, unapologetically visible sorrow.
Joey’s family was more stoic; her sister’s and father’s eyes were rimmed with red, but they managed to hold themselves together.
Idly standing there, watching as Joey’s family wrapped Ellie in their arms, I felt truly jealous of him for the first time.
He was welcome here in a way I never would be; they knew him.
Something he said to Joey’s father pushed him over the edge, and he started openly crying, which made Ellie’s sobs begin anew.
I found myself watching Joey’s mother, who had yet to shed a tear, as she rubbed circles on her husband’s back.
That night, I held Ellie as he drunkenly confessed that he blamed himself for her death.
“I just let her leave without checking if she was good to drive. She was always so careful, you know? She—she seemed invincible,” he managed to gasp out between sobs.
I could have absolved him of his guilt. If it was anyone’s fault, it was my own. After all, wasn’t I the one who had antagonized her into leaving? Wasn’t I the one who had watched her chug a glass of wine minutes before she got in her car?
I said nothing.
In the past couple of years, he had become my best friend. Maybe my only friend. But Joey had been kind of right when she accused me of hating him.
I let Ellie blame himself, and I held my guilt inside, keeping the truth between myself and Joey. Another secret for the two of us, the second one that now belonged only to me.
The following month was one of the low points of my life—and despite my massively publicized success, my life was not without its fair share of low points.
It took me longer than I’d care to admit to unpack why that was.
On the one hand, before the night of her death, I had not seen Joey in seven years.
We weren’t friends. We never really had been—I’d never had many friends to speak of.
By the time Joey died, we were the opposite of friends.
I knew, without a shred of doubt, that if someone had asked her if she hated me, she would have said yes.
On the other hand, I knew that I was partly to blame for her death. If I hadn’t antagonized her, she wouldn’t have left so early. If I had antagonized her a little bit more and for the right reasons, she might have taken my advice and ordered an Uber.
I antagonized her too much and yet not enough, and so she died.
I don’t remember the first time I saw Joey.
I do remember that we were in one of the same business classes.
One day, the professor called on her to answer what I—and, from the looks on the other students’ faces, most of my classmates—thought was an impossible-to-answer question.
She responded so eloquently and succinctly that I couldn’t help but perk up every time he called on her after that. I found her riveting.
We didn’t officially meet until the next semester. We were introduced by Ellie and Cat at a party. By that point, I was dating a girl named Rachel. I’m not ashamed to admit that I would have dropped Rachel in a heartbeat had I caught even the slightest hint of interest from Joey.
Needless to say, I didn’t.
Life moved forward. Rachel and I broke up. I would have tried asking Joey out, but it was painfully obvious that she was in love with Ellie. So I moved on. We graduated and began stumbling our way through adult life.
I met and married Ingrid in quick succession, which was a mistake. Ellie married Cat. I received an invite to the wedding.
I went, expecting a mind-numbingly boring time. I was never one for weddings, which was part of the reason why Ingrid’s proposition that we run off and elope just weeks after meeting each other had been so alluring—no wedding, no spectacle. Just a whirlwind romance and then a marriage.
The night of Ellie’s wedding was anything but boring.
It was a night that would have changed everything if only I had let it.
Ingrid and I had been married for two years—and I didn’t expect us to make it through two more. We’d been fighting almost constantly, and the icing on the cake was when I discovered, just a week prior to my friends’ wedding, that she was having an affair.
I’m not proud of returning the favor by cheating on her with Joey, but I won’t say I regret it either.
What I do regret was Joey overhearing my conversation with my wife. And how I handled that.
Joey and I both said hurtful things. After I had time to cool down, I tried to call her. Straight to voicemail. I texted—the bubble turned green.
She’d blocked me.
I should have tried harder. I should have fought.
I eventually came to realize that. But all we had had together was one passionate night.
I was in the middle of a relationship that had started out passionate and devolved into a contentious, adversarial mess.
How was I to have any confidence that a relationship with Joey wouldn’t end the same way?
I went back to Ingrid. I told her what I’d done, though I lied about one part and said it was with a stranger.
She said she forgave me, but I think her forgiveness came from the fact that her life would have become indescribably different were she to divorce the millionaire husband who supported her.
That worked just fine by me.
We got into a cycle: We would fight for months; one of us would cheat on the other; the other person would “discover” the affair; we would go to couples therapy and pretend to forgive each other.
We would pretend we were fine. And then we’d do it all again.
Her favorite lie was to pretend she had a book club, conveniently forgetting I could track the location of her phone.
Or maybe she wanted me to see.
Meanwhile, Joey and I didn’t talk for seven years.
And then we did.
And then she died.
Three weeks after Joey died, I finally filed for divorce.
I’d like to say the shock of losing the woman who I realized I had been hung up on for the better part of a decade sparked me to make some sort of change in my life, something other than filing for a divorce I should have filed for seven years earlier, but it didn’t.
Other than my divorce, the only change her death sparked was that I adopted her asshole cat.
Ellie posted all over social media about how he was looking to rehome Joey’s cat. Apparently, no one would take her. Ellie said he would have kept her if Cat weren’t allergic—I’d been drunk enough to snort at the irony of that.
I waited a full day before I gave in and messaged him.
It took five minutes after meeting that demon spawn for me to figure out that Ellie had been a little less than honest. Sure, Cat might have had allergies—although I had my doubts—but the reason he wasn’t keeping Ruthie was obviously that she was a little hellion.
Ruthie loved scratching everything in sight.
She bit and scratched me so often, I started wearing thick, long-sleeved sweaters as a general policy, even in the increasingly warm LA weather.
She insisted on sleeping by my feet but attacked them whenever I shifted.
Over time, I became adept at sleeping without moving at all.
No amount of money spent on Ruthie could make her love me.
I bought her treats and toys, hoping to find some magic combination that would make her realize I was her friend, but no such luck.
When she wasn’t attacking me, she just sat there and stared as if she could see down to the core of me, to the myriad flaws I worked so hard to keep hidden from the world.
She was like her mother that way.