My younger brother is marrying my ex-friend whom I haven’t spoken to in 11 years.

I’ll try to sum this up with the true need-to-know info. But I have a broken heart over this situation and would be grateful to know what other people would do, or if other people have been in a similar situation and what happened.

My [35F] brother [31M] is marrying an ex-friend of mine from my high school and college years. We had a weird friendship that was sometimes great and sometimes felt kind of torturous. Looking back, I can see I just really wanted her to like me and fell into some codependent behaviors around her thinking maybe that’s how I could get us to be true friends. Of course I didn’t know that’s what I was doing when I was a teenager, but now I can see it was. She was kind of a depressed person and I’d just always be there for her. She refused to learn to drive, so I’d drive her places. When we graduated from high school, she said she knew I was her friend who’d always be there for her no matter what (no mention if she’d be there for me). I even got her a job our first summer home from college and drove her to that every day. She went to a college 20 mins from me and I’d visit her and go to all her plays (she was a theater major).

Then I moved across the country for grad school and was roommates with a mutual friend of ours. The roommate couldn’t pay rent, so I had to ask her to move out. It was a really anxiety-inducing experience, and the mutual friend did not take it well. She went crazy telling people how awful I was for “kicking her out on the street” (her older brother lived down the street from us, she had lots of time and she was fine). But people back home instantly cut me out of their lives, including the woman my brother’s now marrying. She hasn’t said a word to me since this incident with asking the mutual friend to move out for not paying the rent. She and her family (who I was close to) blocked me on social media and I just never saw or heard from her again.

My brother and this woman have now been together for over four years and still we haven’t seen or spoken to each other. I started working with a therapist and prepared to see her over the holidays with my boyfriend (now husband), and she just didn’t show up. Then the pandemic happened, and no one was traveling. I got engaged, and then a few weeks later my brother called me on my birthday to tell me he was engaged to this woman. For my entire engagement, the question of what to do about my brother and his now fiancé weighed on me. I talked to both a therapist and our rabbi, and got to a place where I could invite them both. My brother came but his fiancé didn’t.

Now my husband and I just received a save the date for their wedding in about four months. Even though this situation has weighed on me, I’ve also not felt like it was real, because it’s like I’ve been dealing with a ghost I don’t want in my life anymore. Now I’m trying to picture going to their wedding and facing all my old friends who abruptly cut me out of their lives. I’d rather do anything else.

The thought of having things be like this indefinitely, through babies and holidays and funerals and whatever else happens, is devastating. I used to be close to my brother, but this situation has practically made us strangers.

Where do I go from here?