Gorgeously written, Mystery Author! I love the way you bring these two women together. I never considered how similar their stories ended up being, but now that you've pointed it out, it's easy to see the parallels.
You write very movingly of the circumstances each of them has faced, weaving past with present, showing how even the choices we make, as Bobby Burns once said, 'aft gang astray', and leave us hungering for what might have been. How lovely, then, to find the two of them finding each other in the midst of losses, forming a friendship and then choosing to allow it to become the something more they had both longed for. Now neither will have to face a future alone, and that is a wonderful thing. :-) Brava!