“Yeah, I’m good.” She sets down her coffee, settles herself on one end of the couch, laptop in the cradle of the legs she crosses underneath her. No further explanation forthcoming, I guess, but even so—it’s too rare these days, having time alone here with Sibby where she doesn’t seem so determined to be in a different room than me. She doesn’t even make a move to put earbuds in.

I feel the familiar stir of hope I’ve felt so many times over the past few months, since this plane of distance between us opened. This is it, I’m thinking. This is when we’ll work it out, whatever’s gone wrong between us. This is when it’ll go back to normal. I walk the length of the living space, make a stop at the refrigerator that’s to the right of our front door—it’s bigger here, sure, but it’s still got one-quarter of a kitchen in the living room—and reach in for a cup of yogurt. We keep our stuff separate these days, as if there’s a chalk line down the middle of all the shelves. It is thoroughly inane, especially because we still shop at the same bodega, buy almost all the same foods.

“Aren’t you late?” I lob casually.

“I asked for the morning off. Tilda’s getting the kids ready for school.”

“That’ll be a disaster,” I say, and it’s a slow pitch I’m sending her way, an easy hit for once-familiar unloading about Sibby’s boss, who doesn’t work but who manages to stay out for twelve to fifteen hours a day and who seems startlingly unfamiliar with both of her children’s routines. The last time Sibby was sick, Tilda forgot about the youngest’s lactose intolerance and the results of an impulsive, tantrum-preventing ice-cream cone were felt for days and days.

But Sibby only says, “She’s good with them,” and there’s a thread of censure to it, as though she needs to defend a woman who once made her stay overnight and sleep in the bathtub closest to Spencer’s room in case he had another nightmare about Frozen. Another way I’ve been shut out: not even worthy of a good, old-fashioned “my job sucks” diatribe.

“Yeah, of course,” I say, because I basically agree with anything now when she deigns to talk to me.