Camille had a rule: whoever ended the argument did not apologise first. It was not a good rule — she knew that even as she made it. But it felt important at the time, a way of keeping score in a game she was losing too often. The silence lasted four days. She filled it with work, with friends, with the specific busyness of someone avoiding a thought. On the fifth morning, she picked up her phone before she was awake enough to remember the rule. She typed: I'm sorry I said it like that. He replied in thirty seconds. They talked for an hour. She had given in — not to him, she understood later, but to the truth that being right was worth less to her than being close to him.

Felix had not expected it to be this hard. He had ended the relationship with clarity — or what felt like clarity at the time — and he had meant every word. But meaning something and feeling its absence are different things, and the absence was louder than he had planned for. Her name appeared in small places: a playlist, a restaurant, a word she used that nobody else used the same way. He deleted her number. He made plans on the evenings they used to spend together. He held out for six weeks, which felt, from the inside, like considerably longer. He was not certain, at the end of those six weeks, whether he had been strong or simply slow. But he had learned something about the distance between a decision and the feeling that follows it.