Come on man, you know the game too good to be saying that. There is no girl at B&R that comes even close emotionally to what MC felt for Zoey. You can't fake growing up together, you cant replace or replicate those memories and you cant get to that level of trust in 6 months or even a year or 2.
In theory, sure. In practice, fuck that. If it was real life, be my guest and care more about some childhood friend who dipped out than for some newly forged thing.
Since it's an interactive story, and the MC's supposed to be my link to it, and Sage or Jill or Bella or Quinn i've seen grown closer to the MC, and "show don't tell", and fifty other storytelling things, shit like that is only bound to create a dissonance between the player and the character. 'Their' character, to be precise, which speaking personally would be enough to turn me off content even if it were decent enough by itself, because of the sensation it's being forced on me.
Plus, not to go off on a bit of a tangent, i dare say this interlude didn't land for a lot of people not because it told Zoey's backstory in San Diego, but because it rushed to it. It spent too little time setting up her relationship with the MC and a disproportionate amount of it tearing it down, especially considering no prior work was put into setting any of that up.
Which ultimately left those of us not too interested in filling the voids, or indeed not too willing to give Zoey herself a chance ('cause she hot or DCP big brain), with 5 to 10 minutes of one character we care about getting treated like shit (MC), a whole lot of superfluous, and no reason to care about the 'childhood friend' who did that, or even think of their relationship as anything more than convenient fuckbuddies.
Complicating things just for the sake of..... 
from left to right 
That's 2 of them btw....
