“I wish you had believed me,” I said.

“I wish I hadn’t spent years trying to convince myself I didn’t care.

But I’m not going to rewrite the good life we’ve built.”

“Neither would I,” he said, after a pause.

“I wouldn’t want to change who they are.”

It was the closest we came to talking about our past without using it to explain away our present.

My company continued growing, though I learned to delegate more.

Brenda became chief operations officer, a promotion long overdue.