Lena and Fiona had been friends for twelve years when the call came. It was a Saturday morning in January, not a special one, and the person calling was not Fiona. It was a mutual friend named Hannah, who had assumed Lena already knew because, as it turned out, most people in their circle did.

Lena’s husband had been having an affair. It had started the previous summer, around the time of a company away day that Marcus had come home from and described as fine, just the usual stuff, a bit dull honestly. He and a colleague had been seeing each other, on and off, for six months. Several people in their wider social circle knew, or had suspected. Hannah knew. And Fiona — who had been at Lena’s house for dinner three weeks before Christmas, who had sat at her kitchen table and smiled at Marcus and asked him about his new role and helped Lena clear the plates and stayed until half past eleven — Fiona had known since July.

Lena sat with that for a long time before she did anything else.

The marriage ended. That part, in some ways, was the more straightforward grief. Marcus had been dishonest in a way that answered its own questions. She did not have to spend much time wondering about Marcus.

She had to spend a lot of time wondering about Fiona.

She called her about a week after the call from Hannah. Fiona picked up on the third ring and before Lena had said anything she said: “I know. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know what to do.” She said she had found out at a birthday party in July from someone who had assumed she already knew. She said she had spent the following six months trying to figure out the right moment to tell Lena, and that there had never been a right moment, and that it had been eating her alive, which she knew was not the point, and that she was sorry. She said it several times. She meant it.

Lena let her finish. Then she said: “I needed you to tell me.” Fiona said she knew. Lena said she would need some time. Fiona said she understood, and that she would be there when Lena was ready, and Lena said okay and hung up.

That was fourteen months ago. They have seen each other three times since, at events where not going would have been a statement. They are civil. They text occasionally. The texture of the friendship has changed in a way that neither of them has named directly, and Lena does not know yet whether it will come back.

She understands, in the abstract, why Fiona hesitated. The situation was impossible. There was no version of telling her that was clean. There was no right moment and Fiona was not wrong about that. But the six months is the part Lena keeps returning to. Six months of phone calls and a Christmas morning and a dinner in December where Fiona sat across from her husband and said nothing. Six months of the two of them talking about everything except the one thing that mattered most. Six months of Lena talking about how well things were going, and Fiona nodding, and the gap between what Fiona knew and what Lena knew growing wider in a room that looked, from the outside, like two old friends having a perfectly ordinary evening.

She is not sure yet whether she will fully forgive it. She has decided she does not have to know the answer to that now.

What she knows is that there is a particular kind of loneliness in being the last person to understand your own life.

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