How, in Node.js, to respond to a GET request from client (send some HTML in response)?

I have a Node.js app which, among other things, responds to a AJAX (jQuery) $.get() request from a Web page by sending some HTML back to that page. The app uses Express.

So in the server code, I have:

app.get('/friends', api.friends);, where api is defined as api = require('./static/routes/api') and i'm setting app.use(app.router);.

In myapi.js module, I have api.friends code: I have

exports.friends = function(request, response) { ...lots of code... };

wherein I create some specific HTML.

Now, my question is: How do I actually send this HTML back to the client? I can't use the passed-in response object because this is no longer an Express-type response object, so the usual reponse.send(), .end(), etc. methods don't exist.

I have no idea what to do, reflecting a lack of understanding of Node and its innards (this is my first Node app), so any and all help will be greatly appreciated and welcomed. Thank you.

As @Daniel stated in his comment, the response object is certainly an Express object, and you can return your HTML simply by rendering a view, like so:

exports.friends = function(request, response) {
   //do stuff
   response.render('friends.html');
 };

Of course, you would have to define your views in your app.js setup, with something like this:

app.set('views', __dirname + '/views')

Ugh! I am such an idiot! In my exports.friends handler, there's a request going out which, as a part of its calling parameters, takes a function of the form function(error, response, body). Note the response parameter. I was sending the results within this function, which of course used this response object and not the one passed through exports.friends(request, response). Doh. Oh well - thank you anyway - you made me look at the code again, and with the persepctive of knowing that the response object was legitimate, I was able to see the error. Thank you again - appreciated!