The previous tenants had left marks in the carpet. Caer had noticed them on the first day and for two years had thought of them as belonging to someone else's life. Now the apartment was his again and the marks were still there: square impressions in the pile where the sofa had been, a long rectangle where something heavy had been dragged.
He had been standing by the window for a while. Not looking at anything specific. The sky was that particular February color. His phone was in his pocket and he had not looked at it in several hours, which was unusual for him, which perhaps meant something.
He had already worked out what had been wrong with this relationship. He'd been working on it since November, when it became clear things were moving toward this. The analysis was thorough: she had needed more certainty than he could give. He had needed more space than she could hold. The timing was bad. They had met too soon after her previous thing, too late in his decade of work. These were the reasons, and they were true.
He had similar analyses for the others. He'd been thinking about them this week, the way you think about old injuries, with professional interest, not fresh pain. Four years with the first. Eighteen months. Three years. And now this one, two years.
The analyses were all accurate. The reasons were all true.
They were also all different.
He understood, standing by the window, that this was the problem. He had been looking at the reasons for each failure, examining the local weather, the specific terrain, the fault lines particular to each, when the thing that required examining was the builder.
Some people knew how to build things that held. He had always known what a thing should look like when it was done. He could tell, within the first weeks, exactly what was being built: the scale of it, the shape, the promise of it. He could describe it. He could want it. He could not make a single stone stay.
Her book was on the windowsill. He had texted her about it twice. She had not replied, which was its own kind of answer.
He put it on the empty shelf and left it there.