Though they’d now been separated longer than I’d known them together, I was often struck by the similarity of my parents’ advice, how many values and first instincts and turns of phrase they still shared. They had been together thirteen years, after all. The love had gone away, by my calculation, sometime around my eighth birthday, but their impact on each other was not so easily undone. They did not seem to relish hearing this, which I understood better now. I was still buying eggplant on autopilot and had only recently realised I did not favour the left side of the bed. Without Jon’s playful sparring, my daily life had become less argumentative, and I discovered I preferred it that way. It was hard to learn traits I’d considered mine alone had been forged with or borrowed wholesale from someone else. How embarrassing, to have to figure out what was Me, what was Him, what was Us. How much more embarrassing, to find out you’d got it wrong.