After a few minutes of her sobbing, I asked again. I asked her what happened. We sat on my couch, in the center of my living room, my wine forgotten, and Lisa just said it. It all spilled out.

"I met House at a party during college where he walked past me innocently and, unsurprisingly, he grabbed my ass. I gave him the full wrath of my anger, including a good slap. Very bad idea. Anywhere I saw him, he teased me and mocked me, but for some reason I loved it. I even looked for him sometimes. Well, we became friends, yeah. We were known for our verbal duels in the middle of the quad. We fought over anything and everything. With each other all the time. We became the closest that two friends could be." She paused to bite her lip, "But never more than friends.

"Until graduation. His graduation, not mine. I wasn't an undergrad anymore, but I still had a bunch of med school left. We went to a bar after graduation and he wasn't even drunk, but he went on with all this stuff about how he didn't want to lose me just because he wasn't going to be at Michigan anymore. And then, out of nowhere, he asks me to marry him. And I swear to God, he wasn't drunk and he wasn't kidding. Why the hell was he asking me to marry him when we had never been more than friends, and not only that, he was the one who set that boundary? He was an ass. Obviously I wasn't going to marry him.

"Anyways, years went by; we never saw one another after that night of graduation. I moved to Princeton a few years after graduating from med school, my first friend was one I met at the farmer's market." She took a deep breath, and I knew this would be a name I recognized, "Stacy Warner. Lawyer. I loved Princeton. Just my kind of town. And I had a friend. Well, House moved here too. I assume because no hospital director in their right mind would ever hire him and Princeton sounded just as good as any other place.

"Well, celebrating my job as Dean of Medicine, Stacy was at my house for margaritas. And guess who knocked on the door. Him. They didn't even say a word to each other. But a week later he asked me what my friend's name was and two weeks later they went on a date. At this point, I had known Stacy for over a year. And just as she moved in with him I s-said to him," these last few sentences had become slow and careful. At this point she let out a sob, "I said to him,

'Do you want to know what this will be like 5, 10, 15 years down the road, Greg? I know her. And I know you. You'll never be happy with her. She'll get fed up with how you are and leave and then you'll be crushed. It'll be impossible to get over it. And then she'll come back, and leave, and come back, and leave until it's some sick mind game. She loves you, she hates you, she loves you, she hates you, and finally, maybe, you'll figure out that no, it's not going to work this time around. It's not going to work, ever. You'll never be happy with her.'"

Tears were streaming down Lisa's face by this time. I couldn't believe that there was this entire world, this entire history with him. Something I'd never known. Something full of feeling and hurt, and how could she have never told me this? Was she that embarrassed by having fallen for the biggest jerk on the planet? But that wasn't even the end of the story.

"He was always right about everything," a sob, "but for once I would be right about him instead of the other way around. Being right should have felt good. But when I turned out to be right, it was the worst feeling in the world. Because that's not it. As he turned to leave, I added, 'If it were me instead, maybe you could be happy.'"

I couldn't help but give an audible gasp filled with empathy.

"How the hell!" she practically screamed, puffy red eyes and tear-ridden cheeks, "What right did I have to say that when I had shut him out? What right did I have to say that, when I hadn't even spoken with him in, what? Nine years? And yet," she took a deep breath to calm her anger with herself, "And yet. Who was right? If it were me, maybe he could have been happy."

"Holy…" I replied as she finished off this last sentence with a convulsing sob, "Lisa, why didn't you tell me all of this?"

"He seemed insignificant."