“No,” she agrees. “It’s the thousand small things we’ve stopped saying out loud.”

“We stopped trying to be the perfect version of ourselves,” she says. “And started trying to be the honest version. Turns out, honesty is a lot more romantic than perfection.”

She leans against the doorframe. “What was it about?”

He stares at his phone for forty-seven minutes. Then: Can I see it?

Neither dates anyone else. They tell friends: “We’re focusing on ourselves.” What they mean: I am still measuring the shape of his absence .