We can still spend time together, she said. He stays with us, after all.

I hadn’t realized that, I said. It was very generous of her to allow it.

There’s no big drama, she told me. In fact, they were perfectly civil. It was a state of mind. At some point, it had dawned on her that the marriage had ended and they were only performing a series of gestures they’d committed to memory.

I was interested in this; the internal knowledge. I told her that I often had trouble judging whether a relationship had substance. I could be naive, I said, or oblivious.