She placed Captain, a small stuffed dog she’d kept from childhood, beside a stack of lab manuals and pretended not to notice my smile.

Chloe invited me to a lecture at her campus a month later.

We walked through the autumn leaves afterward and talked about a professor’s argument that elegant models were not always the most useful.

She asked what I thought.

I answered carefully.

She disagreed, and I was delighted that she felt free to do so.

Marianne and I communicated about practical matters without the old tension that had defined our divorce.

We weren’t friends in the way we had once been.