For the first four months, Sofia kept his jumper on the chair in her bedroom. Not because she forgot it was there — she dusted around it. She told herself it was just an object, and objects don't mean anything unless you let them. She started running. She started cooking things she had never cooked before. She joined a book club and talked too much about the first book and not enough about the second. Slowly, without deciding to, she began to move on. Not in the way she had imagined — not clean, not final, not a door closing with a satisfying click. More like a tide going out, slowly, over weeks, until one morning she noticed that the chair just had a jumper on it.

Marco had not planned to message her. He had been sitting in a café they used to go to — which, he admitted later, he had chosen without thinking, or perhaps with too much thinking — and her name had appeared in his head as clearly as if she had walked in. He stared at his phone for eleven minutes. Then he typed: I've been thinking about you. She replied in twenty seconds, which told him something. They met for coffee the following Thursday. It was awkward in all the familiar ways, comfortable in all the dangerous ones. He had gone back before he had a reason to. What he found there was not a solution, but it was not nothing either — and for now, that was what he had come for.