Sometimes we spoke of ordinary things: recipes, dentist appointments, the weather.

Sometimes she cried while describing a remembered song, and I told her about the morning on the porch when my husband expected to move home because the woman he’d left me for had asked him to go.

We never competed over whose loss counted more.

We only listened.

In January my office manager, Sheila, asked me to assist with a billing audit.

I stayed an extra hour checking a series of entries that didn’t match the payment records.