Lou shook her head. “In the end, I as good as thought our relationship to death, if that makes any sense. As soon as Angie started deviating from the plans I had for our future, the clouds of doom started gathering above our relationship. Clouds only I could see and had to make her aware of. Even though it goes against everything I’ve been taught as a yoga teacher. You know, live in the moment and all that.”

Mia tried to follow Lou’s train of thought, but couldn’t. “I’m not sure I fully understand.”

“You may notice I sometimes have a really hard time translating what I think and feel into words. Especially when I’m nervous.” She grabbed her glass of wine. “This helps.”

“It’s okay. You don’t have to explain.”

“I want to. Let me try again.” Lou took a deep breath, put her glass down, and said, “Let me give you another example. From the very beginning of our relationship, which started when we were both still quite young, Angie and I decided we wanted to have children. We talked about it a lot. I even started seriously researching it, right around the time we started to grow apart. Because I thought that if I took some resolute steps in the direction of our future, she would follow suit, but it had the opposite effect. She only started working more. I started pushing more. She pushed back. In the end, you can’t tell a grown-up what to do. And I wasn’t being very subtle about it, either. She kept saying we had time, that women have their children much later these days, and that it would be better to wait until we were more financially stable and so on. Until I woke up one day and realized we didn’t share the same dream anymore. I guess that was the hardest part.”

Mia wasn’t quite sure what to say to that, or how the conversation had suddenly drifted toward Lou’s failures and dreams. Was she meant to share hers? Would it make her come across as shallow if she didn’t have any tales like this to tell—because she didn’t. “Not that I’m the expert, but relationships fail for so many reasons and they’re often much more complex than we can see at first sight.”

“She was good to me. Angie, was.” Lou refilled their glasses. “She got me, you know? Not a lot of people do. We were good together for a long time. Until we weren’t, I guess. But I should really stop going on about myself, can I ask you a question?”

“Isn’t that what tonight is all about?” Mia threw in a crooked smile.

“How do you recover from relationship after relationship ending? And often not on your terms? What does it do to your self-esteem?”