It has been fourteen months. Mia completed rehab. She moved to Flagstaff, where she still lives. She is, as far as I know, sober. Her DUI case settled — she did ninety days home confinement, lost her license for a year, paid restitution to the Tesla owner, and pleaded down the false-information charge to a misdemeanor. She kept her job, barely. She sent me one more card on my birthday, in June. I threw it away unopened. I think about the thirty-one hours a lot. I think about whether those thirty-one hours made me a bad person.
My therapist tells me, gently, that they don't. My mother tells me, more bluntly, that Mia earned them. My husband — who I married nine months after the Tesla and who has never met Mia — tells me that it is not my job to explain myself to anyone about what I did that weekend. I understand, intellectually, that they are probably right. But I also know that for thirty-one hours I let my best friend of fifteen years sit on a plastic cot in a holding cell eating a sandwich she could not swallow, because I had decided that the consequences had finally come for her and I was not going to absorb them for her anymore. So tell me honestly — was the thirty-one hours a reasonable pause, or was it the cruelest thing a friend has ever done?
Was the 31-hour silence justified, or was it cruel?
* Story inspired by real-life situations. Names and details have been changed for privacy.
