The house stood quietly by the shore, pale blue walls salt-bleached and sun-worn, windows catching the early light like it remembered them.
The weekend had finally arrived, the one circled in five calendars, in five different colors of ink. Not for a holiday. Not for an event. For something they'd never quite found the right word for, so they'd just started calling it "the anniversary", and let everyone assume what they wanted.
Nora arrived first. She always did.
She stepped out of her car with a checklist already half-checked, the sea air curling her hair into something she'd stopped fighting years ago.
She lit the welcome candles she'd brought from home, adjusted the lantern by the door, and stood there a moment longer than necessary, like she was bracing for the house to fill up around her.
Amelia came next, suitcase wheels catching on the porch boards, a tin of cookies balanced against a journal she'd clearly been writing in on the drive.
"You brought cookies," Nora said.
"And nostalgia." Amelia held up the journal like evidence.
They were still laughing when the bike showed up, too loud, the way Kai always announced himself before he arrived.
"It still smells like pine and poor decisions!" he yelled, sunglasses on despite the overcast sky, backpack stuffed with snacks nobody asked for.
He grabbed Nora first, then spun Amelia in a dip dramatic enough to nearly take out the welcome candles.
"You're ridiculous," Nora said, smiling anyway.
Eli arrived the way he always did, quietly, camera slung low, watching from the doorway for one beat longer than a normal person would before he stepped inside.
"You're late," Nora told him.
"Fashionably nostalgic." He handed her a framed photo, the five of them, university-era, edges soft from handling. He'd had it for years. She hadn't known that until now.
Lena was last.
She stepped out of her car slowly, eyes moving from the house to the ocean behind it and back again, like she was checking both were still real.
The last time she'd stood on this porch, she'd been the new one, five strangers and her, unsure if she'd earned a seat at this particular table.
Kai didn't give her time to think about it. He was off the porch before she'd shut the car door, hauling her suitcase out of her hands and pulling her into a hug hard enough to knock the hesitation right out of her shoulders.
Inside, the house woke up properly. Blankets over the couch. Photos tacked crooked into corners because crooked was how they'd always done it.
Music low, half throwback, half something newer none of them could quite agree on.
Nobody made a speech. They never did. The night just started happening to them, the way it always had, Kai claiming the speakers like territory, Amelia curling into the window seat with her journal already open, Lena drifting to the porch to let the wind do something to her face she didn't want anyone to see yet.
And Eli, finding reasons to stay near Nora. Reaching for the same mug. Standing a half-step closer in the kitchen than the space really required.
She noticed. She filed it away under later and went back to counting beds.
By the time the sky burned down to honey and bruised purple, they were on the floor by the fireplace, mugs in hand, nobody performing anything.
"Do you realize," Amelia said, quiet, "it's been almost a decade since we met?"
The silence that followed wasn't empty. It sat with them like a sixth person.
"To surviving each other," Kai finally said, raising his mug.
"To choosing each other," Nora added.
Mugs met. Outside, the tide pulled back and came in again, patient as ever.
Nobody said what they were all thinking, that choosing implied it wasn't guaranteed.
That somewhere between the cookies and the photo and the hand that lingered too long near a mug, this weekend was already asking a question none of them had answered yet.