Mario and Sonya

He just called me. At one in the morning. Drunk. Or maybe just desperate.

Sonya is gone. He said it like she was a possession he'd misplaced. "Sonya is gone, Flavio. She might be pregnant. What am I supposed to do?"

I told him the obvious thing: find her, apologize, figure out if there's actually a baby.

But I also know Mario. And I know that he won't do the obvious thing. He'll do what he always does—he'll move forward and try to pretend the past doesn't exist.

He invited Simona and Anneka to lunch on Sunday. He made a point of mentioning both of them, which means he's already calculated that having them both present gives him more control over the situation.

I'm starting to hate him a little bit. Not in a dramatic way. Just a slow, corrosive kind of hate that comes from watching someone you care about continually choose to be worse than they could be.

I should tell him this. I should tell him exactly what I think. But I won't. Instead, I'll listen to him talk and I'll offer some vague counsel and I'll go back to pretending that I don't notice the ugliness underneath everything.

That's what friends do, apparently.