The One Who Stayed

Chapter 1

The Funeral

The church bells were still ringing when Tessa Marchetti scanned the pews one last time and confirmed what she already knew.

Tyler wasn't coming. She was eighteen, five foot five, curvy in a way she'd spent the last year trying to disappear inside oversized sweatshirts, dark hair pulled back for the occasion, brown eyes red-rimmed and swollen from three days of crying.

She stood in the third pew of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, staring at Poppi Vittorio's casket — dark, polished mahogany he would have complained about the price of for the rest of eternity — and thought that if he could see the flower arrangements alone, he'd have made everyone leave and go eat instead.

That was Poppi. Sixty-one years married to the same woman, three daughters, eleven grandchildren, and not one important conversation in that family had ever happened anywhere but a kitchen table with a plate of something in front of it.

He said hungry people said cruel things, and fed people forgave faster.

She'd asked Tyler to be there three days earlier, voice already raw from crying.

He'd promised. Then nothing — no text, no call — until a message two days later about being "swamped," like a funeral were an appointment you could reschedule.

Her father noticed. He noticed everything, even on the worst day of his own life, and that night, on the back porch with a glass of wine he wasn't drinking, he said the only thing he ever said about Tyler that she'd remember word for word for years.

"I never liked that boy," he said, staring at the dark yard instead of at her. "Not because he isn't smart, or handsome. I never liked him because he's all about himself. A boy who's about his family shows up on the worst day. A boy who's only about himself finds a reason not to."

She didn't have an answer for that. She still didn't, months later. It was in the church hallway, twenty minutes before the cemetery, that the rest of it started. She'd gone looking for a bathroom when she heard her Aunt Connie's voice drop into something sharp and low.

"Don't think I don't know what you're planning to do with Papa's half of the house."

Tessa froze against a rack of donated winter coats.

"He's not even in the ground yet, Connie."

"He's about to be. That's exactly my point."

Her mother, Angela, rounded the corner at exactly the wrong moment, heard exactly the wrong sentence, and something in her face closed like a door slamming somewhere deep inside a house.

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"You know exactly what it means."

Tessa backed away before it could escalate further, heart pounding, feeling like she'd witnessed the exact moment a fault line she'd never known existed finally cracked open under all three of her mother's sisters at once.

By the following Sunday, there was no dinner at Grandma's house for the first time in Tessa's whole life.

No sauce on the stove. No cousins spilling out of three cars into the driveway.

Just silence, and a group chat that had gone eerily, permanently quiet.

The only person who didn't disappear into that silence was Tessa's older sister.

Antonia Marchetti — Toni to everyone except their grandmother, who insisted on the full name — was three years older, already a senior at Kingston University two states away, tall and easy-graced where Tessa was curvier and quieter.

She'd always been the decisive one, the one who ran things, the one their cousins had looked to first even before Tessa.

She was fiercely, almost stubbornly pro-love for everyone else on the planet — she'd cried actual tears at two separate friends' engagements that year — and equally fierce about wanting absolutely nothing to do with it herself, a policy she enforced with the same discipline she applied to everything else in her life.

She drove six hours home the night after the funeral without being asked, and sat on the end of Tessa's bed that first terrible night, not saying much of anything useful. Just present.

"This is going to get worse before it gets better," Toni said, staring at the ceiling. "I've watched Mom and her sisters do this dance my whole life. It usually stays buried until something forces it up. A death is exactly the kind of thing that forces it up."

"How do you know it'll get better at all?"

"I don't, actually." Toni found her hand in the dark and squeezed it once, hard. "I just know you're not going to survive it by yourself. So whatever happens — you've got me. That part isn't optional."

Tessa didn't know yet how much she was going to need to hold her sister to that.

She didn't know that four months later she'd be standing in a driveway three states away, watching a moving truck swallow the last box, leaving behind every person who'd ever called her Tessa — every person except the one already waiting at the other end of the drive, and a best friend who hadn't yet made a promise of her own but was about to.

? ? ?

Nina Ferraro had been Tessa's best friend since they were four, effortlessly thin and blond and sun-freckled in a way that made strangers assume she'd never had an insecure day in her life.

She was the one who showed up every single day that first terrible week — food nobody asked her to bring, bad television turned up loud, the specific loyalty of someone who'd loved Tessa longer than Tessa had loved almost anyone.

"I think my mom's going to make us move," Tessa told her, a week after the funeral.

Nina's face fell. "Move where?"

"Somewhere far. She can't be in the same state as her sisters right now."

"What about school? What about—" Nina stopped, but Tessa heard the rest anyway. What about me.

"Whatever happens," Nina said, the night before the moving truck came, "you're not losing me. I'll figure out a way to end up wherever you end up."

Tessa didn't fully believe her. Her aunts had meant every Sunday dinner too, once. She went to see Tyler two weeks after the funeral, heart pounding the whole drive.

"Is it true?" she asked, the second he opened the door. "About you and Erin?"

"Where'd you hear that."

"That's not a no."

"Forget Erin for a second." Her voice shook. "My grandfather died two weeks ago, Tyler. We've been together five years, since I was thirteen, and you couldn't be bothered to show up for the worst week of my life. What's it even going to look like once I'm at college?"

He was quiet for a long moment, and when he spoke, there was none of the guilt she'd braced for.

"I met someone. Online. Her name's Kayla. We just — we clicked. I think I'm in love with her."

"You think you're in love with her."

"I don't want to be with you anymore."

Five years of her life rearranged themselves in real time into something smaller than she'd ever imagined.

"You're telling me this like you're returning a library book a few days late." Something in her chest broke loose as anger instead of tears, for once. "I want you to explain the part where you let me stand at my grandfather's funeral alone, knowing you'd already checked out."

He was quiet again, and when he finally answered, something colder came through.

"My dad's been saying for months I should end it. He thinks your family's a mess right now, and he's not wrong. Everybody in town knows about the fighting. He asked what the point was of staying with you if it meant getting my name associated with whatever's happening with your family."

"So this was never about Erin, or Kayla, or any girl at all." Understanding arrived in pieces, each one worse than the last. "This was about whether my family embarrassed you enough to make me not worth the trouble."

He didn't deny it. That was the part that stayed with her longest. She told Nina everything that night, and Nina held her without a word about the small things she'd tried to warn her about, months ago. Toni came over the next afternoon.

"He's an asshole," Nina announced, arms crossed. "Somebody needs to say it out loud in this room."

"I heard he's actually been sleeping with Erin too," Nina added, quieter. "Since before the funeral. Way before Kayla."

Tessa texted him, hands shaking.

Tessa: How long has that actually been going on.

Tyler: whatever, it's over anyways. been going on a few months I guess. does it matter now

"Does it matter now," Toni repeated, flat, furious on her sister's behalf. "Five years, and that's his response."

"I actually think I feel better," Tessa said, surprising herself. "At least now I know it was never about me not being enough. He'd already checked out. I was just the last one to find out."

She wouldn't understand for another two years — not until a rink in Vermont, not until a boy who noticed everything and never once did math on what she was worth — just how much that front-porch conversation had actually been the smaller half of what Tyler eventually did to her.

? ? ?

The move happened in March, cold and grey enough that everything already felt like it was dying.

Her father had gotten a job three states away, a promotion, and Tessa understood well enough that the timing wasn't really about the job — it was about her mother needing distance from two sisters she used to talk to every day of her life.

She'd already half-decided on Kingston back in November anyway, on the phone with Toni one night, asking almost offhand what the acceptance odds looked like for someone who just wanted to be near her sister.

"You'd actually want to come here?" Toni had asked, hope breaking through her composure.

"I think I want to be near you. Whatever that ends up looking like."

So by the time the estate blew apart completely, the choice was already quietly made. The night before the movers came, her parents took her to their favorite diner, just the three of them.

"We are so proud of you and your sister," her father said, reaching for both her hands.

"You've had to grow up faster than either of us wanted for you this year.

I believe, years from now, we're going to look back and see this as the year our family got smaller and somehow stronger at the same time. "

Tessa cried into her cold coffee. Her mother slid in beside her and held on.

She woke before her alarm on moving day and stood in front of her bathroom mirror a long time before she could make herself get in the shower — puffy-eyed, exhausted, feeling decades older than eighteen.

She had lost her grandfather, her boyfriend of five years, her aunts, her cousins, the version of her family that used to fill a kitchen with noise.

She called Toni before she'd even decided to.

"I don't know how to do this," she admitted, staring at her own reflection. "I don't recognize any of it. Not my face, not my life."

"You don't have to know who you are today," Toni said. "You just have to get in the car. I'll be waiting in the parking lot. That's the whole job description, and I already accepted it."

By the time the moving truck pulled out, Tessa Marchetti — eighteen, the second oldest cousin still living anywhere near the family, the one who'd organized every summer gathering since she was old enough to hold a clipboard — had lost her grandfather, her boyfriend, her aunts, and every cousin except the sister who'd already left for college years before any of this started.

She promised herself, staring out the back window as the house shrank to nothing, that whoever she became next, she'd build entirely alone.

No family drama. No boy who did math on her worth.

Nobody who could take anything else from her.

It was, she'd think later, sitting on a dorm room floor with two people who'd already broken that vow before she'd finished making it, a remarkably specific promise for an eighteen-year-old — especially one driving four hundred miles closer to the one sister who'd never once given her a reason to build a wall.

She had no idea, four months later, standing in a Kingston University parking lot with two duffel bags and a box of Poppi's old records, how quickly the rest of that promise was about to be tested — or how much she was going to need Toni, and the best friend who'd sworn she'd find a way to follow her, before this year was through.

Nina had applied the week after Tessa left, early decision, and hadn't told her until the acceptance letter came through, three weeks before move-in.

She was waiting outside Tessa's assigned room when the moving cart rolled up, sitting cross-legged on a duffel bag of her own, grinning so hard it looked like it hurt.

"I requested you as my roommate the second I got in," Nina said, before Tessa had even fully processed what she was looking at.

"I wasn't going to risk getting stuck with a stranger when I could just live with my actual best friend.

Surprise. I hope you're not sick of me yet, because we're now contractually obligated to share a bathroom. "

Tessa burst into tears in the middle of the hallway, and Nina crossed the space and hugged her so hard a passing RA asked if everything was okay, and Toni, standing in the doorway with a box of Poppi's records balanced on one hip, just grinned like she'd known the whole time — because she had, the two of them conspiring for weeks to pull this off.