We met when you were 29, I was 26. For years we were inseparable. Even boyfriends, and eventually husbands, didn’t weaken our bond. But for the last few decades, I don’t know if I’d define what we have as a friendship. We didn’t so much drift apart as erect a ladder, which you quickly ascended. Looking up all the time started giving me a crick in my neck. Before long, you’d climbed so high I couldn’t see you anymore. I guess I could’ve used my binoculars. Birdwatching is a hobby of mine, so I own a few. But even when I saw that magnificent white ibis last year, a rare sighting around these parts, I just marveled at it with my eyeballs. I don’t have the patience for aiming those heavy binoculars, much less adjusting the focusing knobs. I think I did yell at you a few times: Margo, wait up! Wait for me! But twenty-something years ago, we were already in our mid-fifties. Maybe your hearing wasn’t what it had been when we first met.

You made more money than me. Your husband made more than my husband. All your kids were financially more successful than all of mine. You stopped digging through the clothes at thrift stores with me, looking for designer labels; you purchased them from Nordstrom online. You stopped asking me to go on Viking cruises with your friends; we both knew I couldn’t afford them.

To be fair, it wasn’t all you. Soon after our last kid left the nest, my husband started accusing me of setting unrealistic goals for myself where volunteering was concerned. Then he started using the word Obsessed. I used to tell him there are starving people who live less than a mile away. I used to tell him our planet is dying right before our very eyes. Now, as with you, my husband and I are positioned too far apart to hear one another.

Then, yesterday, you phoned. “Leah,” you said, “it’s Margo.” Your voice in my ear was as dear and familiar as the cardinal who sings to me every morning outside my kitchen window. “The radiologist found a spot.”

Quickly, you climb down—or maybe I do—and we meet on the same rung. That rung turns out to be a waiting room where you will be getting a diagnostic mammogram. I squeeze your hand until someone calls your name.