Charlotte and Claudia Keeping in Touch — Joan Barfoot

One old woman crouches in a hedge, spying on a long-ago married lover. The other is the recent widow of a lifelong philanderer. Charlotte and Claudia have had quite different lives, one a single career social worker, the other a married career mother, but they've been friends since their youth, with the sort of bone-deep affection that comes of decades-long knowledge. Now at seventy, they're getting together to compare secrets and lives over the necessities of chocolate and wine.