Friends from College

Six Months Later

The baby shower is at a rented loft in Williamsburg. Max organised it, which means it is aggressively tasteful and slightly too expensive. Fairy lights. Potted plants. A charcuterie board that cost more than some people's rent.

Lisa is heavily pregnant — eight months along — glowing in the way pregnant women are supposed to glow in movies. She and Ethan are back together — tentatively, carefully, with the understanding that trust is not a switch you flip but a muscle you rebuild. They are in couples therapy. They are trying.

The Guest List

Sam did not come. She moved to Los Angeles six months ago — a fresh start, she called it on the group chat that nobody uses anymore. She and Ethan text on his birthday. She and Lisa have not spoken since the divorce paperwork went through. Some bridges cannot be rebuilt.

Marianne is there, of course. She booked a recurring role on a streaming medical drama. She plays a nurse with a dark sense of humour. She is excellent in it. She arrives forty-five minutes late, apologises to exactly no one, and immediately starts critiquing the charcuterie.

Nick arrives with Merrill. They got back together after he completed a six-month outpatient programme. He is sober. He is working a steady job at a non-profit. He is the one everyone is most proud of, which he finds deeply uncomfortable.

Felix is running interference with Lisa's mother, who has opinions about natural childbirth. Max is orchestrating the gift-opening schedule with the precision of a military operation.

The Moment

Ethan stands by the window, watching the city. Lisa walks over, places his hand on her belly. The baby kicks.

"Still weird?" she asks.

"Still weird," he says. "Good weird."

They do not talk about the affair. They do not talk about the year apart. They talk about names — she likes Eleanor; he likes James — and about whether the nursery should be yellow or green, and about how Felix's mother almost elbowed Lisa's mother over the last spanakopita.

It is normal. It is mundane. After everything, it is exactly what they need.

The Toasts

Max raises his glass. "To Lisa and Ethan," he says. "And to the tiny human who is about to join the most complicated, dysfunctional, loving group of friends on the planet."

"Hear, hear," Felix says.

"You're all trapped now," Marianne adds. "You're literally related to us."

Lisa laughs. Ethan squeezes her hand.

The afternoon stretches on. There is cake. There is a diaper-changing demonstration that goes horribly wrong. There is a moment, in the late afternoon, when the sun hits the loft just right and everyone is laughing at something Nick said, and Ethan looks around the room at the people who have seen him at his worst — and stayed — and thinks:

Maybe that is what a happy ending looks like. Not a clean slate. Just people who refuse to give up on each other.

This is not an official ending. It is a fan-written imagining of how Friends from College could have concluded.