Then she looked at me and asked, “How’s the silence at your place?”

I knew exactly what she meant.

“Better,” I said. “Real.”

She nodded.

“Mine too.”

We ate eggs, drank bad coffee, and talked about ordinary things for nearly an hour. Work. Weather. A bookstore Audrey liked. The absurdity of how expensive rugs had become in Denver. Nothing grand. Nothing unresolved. No dramatic last confession. Just two people sitting in the exact kind of ordinary moment selfish people always take for granted until they blow their lives apart chasing the illusion of something more exciting.

When the check came, we split it.

Separate cards.

Separate lives.

Clear eyes.

Outside, the morning was cold and bright. We stood on the sidewalk for a minute, neither in any hurry.

Then Audrey smiled—an actual smile this time, not the blade-thin version from the first morning—and said, “Well. At least they finally gave us honesty.”

I looked up at the gray Denver sky, then back at the diner window where, months earlier, I had been the last person to know my marriage was already over.

“No,” I said. “We took it.”

Then we walked in opposite directions, and for the first time in a very long while, that felt exactly right.