Jori had been watching the structure for a long time.
It was not that Caer didn't try. This was the thing she had needed people to understand, when she tried to explain it in the years after: the trying was real. She had seen it. He'd put in the hours. He'd shown up in the difficult weeks, the ones that required showing up, and he'd done the work she asked of him and some she hadn't asked for.
But there was something in the middle of it that had never arrived.
She'd noticed it in the first year. A place where the thing they were building should have connected to something in him and didn't, where a wall should have been load-bearing and instead felt decorative. She had told herself: not yet. She had told herself: this is what early looks like. She had compensated for it quietly, taking weight onto her side of the structure that should have been distributed.
By the second year she was carrying most of it.
Not out of resentment. Out of love, genuinely. The parts that were there were real. He was real: the attention, the care, the specific way he knew her. What was missing was not presence but a capacity. The capacity to make something permanent. To set a thing down and trust it to stay.
She understood, the day she took her boxes, that he would now perform his analysis of their two years. He would find the reasons. The reasons would be accurate. They would describe the weather and the terrain and the fault lines particular to this specific two years, and they would all be true.
She hoped, driving away, that this time the analysis arrived at a different level. That he would look at the builder and not the building.
She did not know if it would.