Laura,

Make sure you have deleted all contact information from BOTH phones, and all messages from each other on BOTH PHONES.  Then restart the phones.  It's important that there are no remaining messages or contact information when you try to start anew.

THEN, send a text to each other using only the manually entered phone number.  If that is successful (it comes from the phone number), then add the phone number and contact information from the message.

It seems it's still seeing the vtext messaging somehow, so it's critical that information is GONE and you are starting totally new with the phone number only.

HTH,