That night we finally stopped.

We talked for a long time after that, longer than we had talked in years, and most of it was about the strange machinery of how two people survive the same house and never once compare notes.

We had grown up in adjacent bedrooms.

We had heard each other through the walls.

And in thirty years of adulthood we had built a careful, loving relationship with a locked door at the center of it, and we had both known the door was there, and we had both agreed, without ever negotiating the agreement, never to try the handle.

I understood, that night, why.