Yeah, they'd definitely still be seperate, but they knew each other before the party/guild was ruined, and they met up again at quite a while later, probably about... I dunno, 2-ish weeks before now? I'm assuming in-game time has gone to 2-3 months with the time skip, but I dunno.
In either case, this does give us a good place to start out, being new players and whatnot, so yeah, go ahead!