They had been inseparable at university — the kind of friendship that felt like a fact of life, like weather. After graduation, they moved to different cities for reasons that made complete sense individually: work, a partner, a cheaper rent, a fresh start. They kept in touch, then kept in touch less, then remembered to message on birthdays. The calls that used to last two hours became thirty minutes, then catch-ups, then the occasional like on a photograph. Nobody ended anything. Nobody said: this is where we stop. They simply drifted apart — carried by the current of their separate lives until the distance between them was no longer a gap to close but a geography they had both, quietly, accepted.

It was Yusuf who called. He had been thinking about it for months — the strangeness of knowing someone so well and then not knowing them at all. He suggested a weekend, just the three of them, somewhere none of them had been before. They arrived on a Friday evening with the particular awkwardness of people who share a past but not a present. By Saturday afternoon, something had shifted. A shared meal, a long walk, an argument about something small that dissolved into laughter — and underneath it all, the recognition that the people they had been at twenty were still present somewhere inside the people they had become. They didn't recover everything. But they began to come together again, slowly, around what remained.