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Thirty years earlier, three friends had made a promise that felt simple and unbreakable: no matter where life took them, they would meet again on Christmas Day at noon, in the same small-town diner. Back then, time seemed generous, almost endless, and the future felt like something that could always be rearranged. But decades don’t arrive all at once.
They slip by quietly, carrying people in different directions, changing faces, priorities, and unspoken distances. On this Christmas morning, standing outside the familiar diner with snow melting along the roofline, two of the three friends arrived—older, altered, but still carrying the weight of that long-ago pact. Inside, the diner looked almost untouched by time.
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