A man who has held everyone he loves in place by finding exactly the right sentence meets the one person who walks out anyway, and has to decide whether to keep rewriting the line or finally ask a question he cannot control the answer to.

He is good at it. He can hear the half-second before someone pulls back and puts a sentence there in time. Then one person leaves without an argument he can win, and every room he walks into after that becomes a search for the thing he said wrong. The turn: what he calls love and what he calls not being left start to look the same, and the only way to tell them apart costs him the certainty he has been protecting.