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Normally I would say I do not need anything. Gabi has already ordered enough. We could share.

Instead I choose the chocolate one.

When the desserts come, mine is larger.

Gabi stares at it.

“That feels personal.”

“You had your chance.”

“You’ve changed.”

“I ordered cake.”

“Exactly.”

I take the first bite. It is very good, and for a while we eat without talking while people move along the river outside the windows and a boat passes slowly enough that I can hear somebody laughing on it through the glass.

The last time I laughed like that, I had my hand over Colt’s mouth in our kitchen to stop him singing.

My phone stays in my bag. Gabi’s stays face down beside her plate.

After a while the absence of mine begins to itch.

I reach toward my bag.

“Tova is fine.”

“I know.”

“Then leave it.”

My hand stops.

Gabi takes another bite of dessert.

“You’re allowed one good night that doesn’t have to mean anything.”

I meet her eyes and she shrugs.

“I said I was resting my opinions. I didn’t say they were dead.”

I leave the phone where it is.

Gabi starts telling me about a patient who spent twenty minutes insisting that his left knee only hurt on Tuesdays, and I laugh, and she keeps going, and for the length of one dessert I am a woman at a table with her friend and nothing else at all.

On the walk to the car I check my phone. There is nothing from Colt.

I asked for that.

Gabi goes to bed. Tova is asleep in the guest room with the door half open.

I sit on the floor beside the good suitcase and unzip it.

The blue dress is on top. I lay it over the chair.

In the mesh pocket in the lid there is a packet of Swedish licorice. Half of it is gone.