Let me tell you who Mia was before that morning. Mia and I had been best friends since ninth grade. Fifteen years. We had shared a locker. We had gone to prom in a joint group. We had gone to different colleges and called each other every Sunday night for four years. We had moved to the same city at twenty-two, specifically so we could live near each other. I had been maid of honor in her failed first marriage. She had held my hand through my miscarriage in 2021. She had been the first person I had called when my mother was diagnosed with Parkinson's.

Mia was, to use a phrase I had always considered true, the sister I never had. She was also — I had always known this quietly — a person with a pattern around alcohol that none of her close friends had ever quite known how to handle. She had been, in our late twenties, what people called "fun." In our early thirties, she had become what we all, in our private conversations that were never loud enough to become interventions, called "a problem." I had, four months before the night the Honda Civic hit the Tesla, told Mia directly that I was worried about her drinking. She had cried. She had said she would get help. She had not gotten help.