Twelve years is a long time for a friendship to survive childhood, but ours somehow did. We didn’t always share classes, we made other friends, and we developed different interests. Noah became obsessed with baseball, while I became obsessed with art. He tried teaching me baseball statistics, and I retaliated by dragging him to art museums—neither campaign succeeded.

Then, when we were 12, my parents divorced. That changed me in ways I didn’t understand at the time. Our house grew quieter, Dad moved into an apartment 20 minutes away, Mom started pretending she wasn’t crying, and I started pretending I didn’t notice. At school, I stopped eating much at lunch. Noah noticed. He never asked me to explain; he just sat beside me. Sometimes he talked, sometimes he didn’t. Once, he spent 15 straight minutes explaining why our baseball team needed a new relief pitcher—I understood roughly four words, but it helped anyway.

Years later, when I failed my first driving test, Noah showed up at our house carrying two ice creams.

“Why two?”

“One because you tried. And the other because you drove badly.”

I threw a pillow at him.

At 16, when I told him I wanted to quit art because a girl in my class had laughed at one of my paintings, he stole the ugliest dinosaur drawing I’d ever made. The next morning, I found it taped inside his locker.

“Noah! Why is that there?”

He inspected it: “Still looks like a potato with arms.”

“Then take it down!”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because you can’t quit yet, Chrissy. Because the dinosaurs haven’t improved.”

I laughed despite myself. That was Noah—he never gave speeches, he just stayed long enough for whatever hurt to become bearable.

And when my first boyfriend dumped me three weeks before junior homecoming, Noah turned up with chocolate ice cream. He sat beside me on the porch while I cried. After 10 silent minutes, he finally spoke:

“I told you he was an idiot.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“I thought it.”

“That doesn’t count.”

“It should.”

I laughed so hard I nearly choked on my ice cream. Noah still tells that story, and I still threaten him every time.

So when senior prom came around, there was never really a question about who I wanted to go with, but Noah apparently believed there was. One afternoon in February, he found me by my locker.

“Chrissy, do you remember first grade?”

I pretended to think: “No.”

His face dropped: “Seriously?”

“Noah, I’m kidding.”

Then he held out his pinkie, and suddenly I was six again—raisins, dinosaurs, a cruel little boy, and a promise I had forgotten that afternoon and somehow spent 12 years keeping anyway. I hooked my pinkie around his.

“Prom?”

Noah nodded: “Prom. I already bought the bow tie in November.”

“Noah, stores were not going to run out of bow ties.”

“You don’t know that.”

On prom night, I was upstairs wrestling with an earring when the doorbell rang. From just beyond the front door, Noah’s voice drifted in: “She said that 15 minutes ago!” Traitor.

I grabbed my purse, but before I reached the stairs, I heard Mom open the front door. Then came the kind of silence that makes you stop moving. I stepped closer to the landing. Noah stood in the entryway in a navy suit, white shirt, and that ridiculous bow tie perfectly straight, holding a small corsage. He was smiling, but Mom wasn’t—she was staring at him like she’d seen a ghost.

“Chrissy is almost ready,” she said quickly, then turned and saw me on the stairs. “Come upstairs with me.”

“Mom, Noah’s waiting.”

Noah lifted the corsage: “I have this. It’s rosemary. The florist said it means remembering. And I remember promises.”

Mom made a small sound behind me, her eyes wet: “Upstairs, Chrissy.”

The second we stepped into my bedroom, she shut the door and locked it.

“Okay, you’re scaring me, Mom. If this is about Noah having Down syndrome, I swear to God—”

“No. Do you remember the year your father left? You stopped eating lunch.”

“How do you know that?”

“Noah told me. He found me one afternoon in the school parking lot. He caught me crying in the car. I thought nobody saw me, but Noah did. He asked me if you were broken.”

My breath caught: “Why?”

“Because you weren’t eating, sweetie. You weren’t laughing. He said you sat by yourself sometimes. I told him you weren’t broken. Then he said something I’ve remembered for six years: ‘Good. Because I don’t know how to fix people. I only know how to stay.’”

Mom squeezed my hands as a tear slipped down her cheek: “For six years, Noah has kept a promise to me that you never knew existed.”

I stood paralyzed, staring at her in shock as the words hung heavy in the silent room…