A friendship can end and still have been real. The ending doesn’t erase the years.

An ending has a way of rewriting everything before it. You start going back through old evidence looking for the part that was false, as though the fact that it stopped proves it was never true. It does not work that way. Things end for reasons that have nothing to do with the years being genuine, including people simply growing in different directions.

Let the good parts stay good when you think about it. You can be sad about the ending and still keep the three summers. There is nothing you need to decide about it now.