When I felt better, I offered to take him to lunch for his birthday. We hadn’t seen each other in a while, and it turned into an opportunity for him to tell me about his new girlfriend. She was more aligned with the things he liked. They were “California woo-woo” things, as I liked to call them: being healthy, meditating, and embarking on a raw-food diet. I did not want to become sanctimonious about healthy living, but I had lived in California for too long to succumb to it. We were no longer the couple sitting at dinner looking away from each other. Now we sat across from each other engaged, laughing. Why couldn’t we have been like this when we were still married? Maybe we were just better apart than together.

The stakes were lower, I guess, because I could go home by myself and not play out the same rote, fucked-up dynamic with him day in and day out. The kind of dynamic that accumulates resentments so deep that you have to leave. Resentments that seemed both petty and arbitrary after the fact. But they still existed, and their existence made the silence at dinner okay. Worthwhile, even.

But now we leaned in to talk to each other, gently mocked each other with the kind of familiarity that still hurt. I wanted to have someone to counter with, but all I had was Nathan. And he was a distant memory. I considered turning him into someone to be jealous of, but kept my mouth shut, afraid of being pressed for details that I would have trouble making up. I had come up with scenarios about him to masturbate to, but if Bobby asked me where he had gone to school or anything about his actual life I would undoubtedly stutter out the kind of lie that Bobby would notice. His scrutiny felt too embarrassing to risk. Except I had moved on from fantasizing about any kind of sexual encounter with Nathan. I had inserted other random men into bland fantasies of taking walks together, petting dogs together, quietly fucking each other in the middle of the night. It was as if something had muted in me during my marriage, during the peak of my unhappiness, and I could only conjure mundane devotional acts. I was struggling to find a feeling, any feeling, or access anything above lukewarm.

Bobby’s new girlfriend was the kind of woman whom men used the words “easy” and “comfortable” about. Not as a negative, but as something to strive for. I was neither; I was complicated. I knew complicated meant too difficult to be worth it.

I didn’t know what else to be.

As I drove home, my phone rang, and I recognized Bethanny’s number. She told me she had the date for Lawrence’s follow-up and was preparing his final exit, too.

“Can you help me finish the preparations?”

“Sure,” I said.