Helen bought a one-bedroom condominium three miles from Diane's townhouse. It had no wood paneling. It had a balcony that faced west, and on late afternoons the light came in without drapes to negotiate with, raw and gold and honest. She hung the mantel photographs on a white wall. She joined a book club. She learned to cook for one without calling it practice for loneliness. Some nights she dreamed of Robert and woke furious. Some nights she dreamed of him and woke tender. Both kinds of nights belonged to her now.
Margaret moved to a cottage near the edge of town with a small yard for the brown dog. She sent Helen a Christmas card the first year — plain, unsigned except for her name, no lemon candies mentioned. Helen sent one back. They did not become friends. They became, instead, two women who had loved the same difficult man and refused to let that fact turn them into enemies. In a quieter century, that might have been called grace. In this one, Helen called it enough.
Diane dated carefully. She told the third man she went out with about her father, about the will, about the house on Maple, because she had decided that secrets were a family heirloom she declined to inherit. The man listened. He did not flinch. She kept seeing him. Walter approved, which Diane treated as a more reliable metric than her own caution.
A year after the closing, Helen drove past 214 Maple Avenue. The young couple had painted the front door blue. A plastic toddler trike lay on its side in the yard. The drapes were gone; new curtains, white and thin, moved in the evening air. Helen parked across the street for exactly two minutes. She did not cry. She put the car in gear and drove to Diane's for dinner, where the lasagna was store-bought and the conversation was about municipal zoning and a cat who had recently discovered the joy of cardboard boxes.
"Do you ever regret it?" Diane asked over salad. "The split. The sale. Not fighting."
Helen considered. The balcony light of her condominium lived in her mind beside the amber bars of the old living room. Both were real. Only one still required her to live inside another woman's name on a legal document.
"I regret that he put us in a position where regret was an option," Helen said. "I do not regret choosing a life afterward. The house on Maple went to Margaret Ellison on paper. What happened after the paper was ours. I like what we did with it."