If the answer’s changed, you’ll have lost nothing but some soup and a few rides.”

For a long moment she just looked at me. Then, very slightly, she nodded — the same small nod she’d given in the kitchen, the one that meant she’d decided to risk being wrong about me.

“Okay,” she said. “Past the emergency.”

It didn’t resolve the way things resolve in the versions of this story people tell at parties. We didn’t remarry that winter. Lena didn’t soften into an ally overnight; the first time I answered Sophie’s phone she hung up on me, and it was months before she said more than four words in my direction.

I moved back to my own apartment, because Sophie was right that proximity in a crisis proves nothing, and we did the unglamorous work of learning each other again on purpose — dinners that ended early, one bad argument about the very divorce we were climbing out of, a great deal of tea.

But some things I can tell you.