Bobby likes a lot of things, perhaps nothing more than procreating. The most recent pregnancy, the third,  is harder than the earlier ones, his fiancée sicker than she has ever been. They poll Facebook for baby names even though they always give their children at least 4-5 names so polling seems selfish.

Bobby seems especially riled towards the end of this pregnancy. He talks of Molly's butt in tight California jeans, a 70s goddess and her twin peaks of boundless desire and Scandinavian self-restraint. They slept together, years ago, and the remnants of desire still lingers. He lusts for us, among others, tells his coworkers as much, sends us photos of the coffee cups that he writes his name on each day, walking the 30,000 square feet of the workshop, sanding, shaping, drawing: pencil, tool, coffee, clay. He sends us his day in emoji. He compliments me on my use of textures like lace in photos, ones that urge touching.

He's having his third kid; I'm trying for one.

When Molly is pregnant, and when she has her first, a boy, I feel they are in a club that I am unable to join. Molly stops replying to Bobby and me as much. She'll wait three days and reply with a single word or two, after he's written an opus via text on mistaking the varnish stains on his hands for period blood, and being more ok with the blood than the varnish. Bobby texts us with urgency and his missives are ridiculous or sexy or profound.

And then, the fight.

Molly gets secretly married to a man who is not Bobby. Her husband has been around for years and Bobby doesn't think he's good enough for her. But this husband buys a New England home with her, and wants to have a baby with her, which she badly wants. She said she never would marry but America is bad about health insurance and while pregnant, necessity sends her to the courthouse. She swears me to secrecy. She doesn't tell Bobby or her mother. Until she does. I have never seen him so angry or hurt.

She tells Bobby months later, with faux nonchalance, embarrassed but trying to summon courage. I feel a tectonic shift in the friendship, as if the plates holding the past and future have moved beneath our feet. You shouldn't be able to tell but you can.

Molly feels as if she is being punished for her marriage, a vindictive emotional and sexual cruelty. 5 months later, I ask Bobby why he is mad.  "There was nothing I didn't tell her and she kept this from me," he says. Because she's in love with you, I tell him. But that excuse isn't good enough for him. In Bobby's world, everything is about him, even a friend's marriage to someone else.  He admits how sexually fraught his relationship with Mol is. It explains why Molly's new husband is cruel to Bobby, out of barely concealed jealousy.

Have you ever been on a group chat at war? The tenor of the chat changes. The playfulness is gone. It is no longer us (young, beautiful, carefree) against the world (rich, hard, indifferent). Now the chat is a kind of chore: must reply, must contribute, must connect, but not honestly. It remains us, but weighed down by flawed spouses, who we have all discussed privately, and the banks of resentment and shittalking have piled up, blocking whatever clear water used to flow here. We all live downriver from Shittown.

It helps to air it. I finally get to see Bobby as more than a figment of our sexual imaginations. He knows Molly is tired and busy and worn down by parenthood because he is too. He's the breadwinner and a father of two and when he comes home Megin has him helping build their new baby a bedroom, cutting plywood and tearing down walls and moving fixtures. But he still makes time for the dumb texts, the long phone calls from his driveway where he's been parked for 2 hours, hiding from his duties. I used to think this made Bobby a bad husband. Which maybe he is. Now I see it as a symbol of his steadfast integrity as a friend, involving sacrifices we're not all willing to make.

What fills the space that lust used to inhabit? For Bobby, it is work. He travels to Milan to open a showroom and photograph awkward models in overpriced, hand-painted utilitarian fashion. Italian plumbers pour their hearts out to Bobby in Italian while he eats a pastry and it breaks Bob to tell them he doesn't speak their language. The Italians can't believe he isn't one of them. A friend translates: "you eat from the heart." Bobby says he has never felt so visible, so seen and that it is the best thing a stranger has ever said to him.

Molly says their friendship is never the same. She thinks it made Bobby's wife question why Molly didn't tell him.

Years ago, molly stayed at their house, godmother to their child who is named after her. The requisite late night movie. The fumbled attempts. In the morning Bobby's wife grills Molly: "Did you fuck Bobby?" No. But the jig is up.