They have dinner at Janet's house on a Wednesday — Deborah and Janet and Janet's daughter Cora, who is six and who insists on sitting between them at the table and who has opinions about everything, including the correct way to eat spaghetti, which are enthusiastically expressed and structurally questionable.
Janet is thirty-eight. She has a warm, careful face — the face of someone who has had to rebuild their relationship with their own expression and has done it well enough that only the people who knew her before can see the architecture. Her husband works late Wednesdays. The three of them eat pasta and Cora tells a story about something that happened at school involving a frog and a misunderstanding, and by the end of the story the frog has somehow become a horse and no one can locate the transition.
Deborah listens. She laughs. She eats. She is here and she is somewhere else, the way she sometimes is when she is working something.
After Cora goes to bed, they sit in the kitchen with wine and the particular ease of sisters who know each other well enough that silence is not a problem.
"You're thinking," Janet says.
"I'm always thinking."
"You're thinking about a person."
Deborah looks at her. "How do you know?"
"You make a specific face." She sips her wine. "Who is he?"
"A doctor."
"A surgeon, actually."
Janet looks at her in the specific way she looks at things she is assessing carefully. "Is he good?"
"He's brilliant. At his work. He's—" She stops. She starts again. "He's complicated."
"Complicated like emotionally unavailable or complicated like—"
"Janet."
"I'm just asking."
Deborah looks at the wine in her glass. She thinks about the three containers. She thinks about be careful. She thinks about the board in her apartment and the name at its center.
"He's someone who has done things that I don't have a clear framework for," she says. "And I should have a clear framework for it. It's my job to have a clear framework."
Janet is quiet for a moment. She is very perceptive — she always has been — and she is particularly perceptive about the things Deborah does not say. It is one of the reasons Deborah loves her and also why these conversations are sometimes harder than they need to be.
"Are you in danger?" Janet asks. Not alarmed — just direct.
"No."
"Are you in something complicated?"
"Yes."
"Are you going to be okay?"
Deborah thinks about this honestly.
"I think so," she says. "I just haven't figured out all the pieces yet."
Janet nods. She refills both glasses. "Then figure them out," she says. "You're the best I know at that."
Deborah looks at her sister. At the woman who checks the locks three times and laughs anyway and calls it better.
"Thanks, Jan," she says.