“Don’t have a best friend that’s a girl”—this was the advice from my older cousin. I didn’t take it. Because he followed with, “friends don’t f**k friends. And you’ll want to f**k her.”

It was terrible advice.

My cousin should’ve told me that being best friends with Baylee Wright—since she was twelve—would be the best and worst decision of my life. He should have told me to protect her from what was coming. He should have told me that when a darkness crawled towards us, there’d be no safety net.

Now I’ve signed back on to the same Vegas acrobatic show as Baylee, working together for the first time in years. And she tells me that she’s having trouble in a certain “area” of her life—because of our past.

“You can help me fix it,” she says.

And then she hands me a list.