DELETED SCENES NOTE: These passages are underedited and occasionally feature settings that aren’t in line with the final version. Take them with a grain of salt!

In earlier versions of Good Luck, Babe! half of the chapters were from Yumi’s perspective (trust me, the book is better overall without them). Below is the scene where Yumi sees Noelle’s dad for the first time in a year.

The driver’s side door shuts and I let out a breath, glad Noelle didn’t want me to be there for the conversation with her dad. I know this last year was hard for her, and I just know Mr. Breland wouldn’t immediately forgive me for hurting his baby girl.

I watch Noelle, hair pulled back into two French braids, cross the yard and open the front door, which they always leave unlocked for some White People Reason.

So much has changed in our lives. I wonder if her house looks the same inside—if their kitchen is still a garish shade of yellow, if half the living room wall is still taken up by a Renaissance-style painting of their late shih tzu, Olivia, in the ruffled collar and gilded crown of an English queen.

I didn’t mind Noelle leaving me in the car. I figured I’d play games on my phone, maybe doomscroll, just mindlessly entertain myself until I heard Noelle open the side door. But distraction isn’t in the cards, it seems, because I spend the entire time Noelle is in the house staring at the front door.

When she comes back out with her dad in tow, I’m glad to be hidden by distance and tinted glass. It disguises the roulette wheel of shock and fear that plays across my face.

The last year did something to Noelle’s strong, capable, good-humored father. If it weren’t for the familiar way he watched his daughter, a mix of pride and love and caution, I would say he was beyond recognition. His skin has a sickly yellow tinge and, while he was never particularly skinny, now his rounded belly pushes at his shirt, stretching it in a way that does not look comfortable.

And until this moment—watching Noelle lead her dad to me like an overprotective bulldog, her eyes warning me through the glare on the windows—I hadn’t felt sorrow. I was sad, yes, about the moments I missed with my best friend, about the moments she missed with me. I was angry and embarrassed and hopeful. But it could all be fixed—it’s going to be fixed.

Not whatever this is.

This is the first time I feel that I’ve done something irreparable. I missed something I shouldn’t have missed.

This is grief.

As I’m approached by Noelle and her dad, his usual warmth replaced with a brittle self-consciousness, I push it all down. I stand at the table of my emotions and I flatten all of them like clay sculptures beneath my palm, until the only silhouette still standing is a small mound of excitement.

“Mr. Breland!” I call, swinging my door open and rocketing to my feet. I gather him up in a hug, which he returns with alarmingly skinny arms.

“Yumi,” he says, squeezing me weakly. It presses me against his ballooned stomach, as firm as if he were pregnant.

When I meet his gaze, I hold onto my smile like my life depends on it. His eyes are dull—the whites now yellow. His face is creased by lines that should’ve taken at least fifteen more years to form.

A lump rises in my throat. What happened to the man who practically raised me?

What happened to his daughter after I abandoned her?

And what’s going to happen when I do it again?