Alexei was a brilliant architect. He just didn’t build structures; he built worlds for other people. He knew how to listen. Not the polite nodding kind—waiting for his turn to speak—but listening with his whole being, as if he were an archeologist and another person’s soul were an unexplored tomb full of treasure.

He remembered everything. The offhand remark that as a child she wanted to captain a ship. The way she always picked that same ridiculous lemon cupcake at the bakery. The cheap plastic whale keychain she clipped to her keys because “it’s funny.”

And from that “trash,” from those forgotten crumbs, he built her a world.

He could wake her in the middle of the night to drive to the river “because the wind is captain-worthy tonight.” He could circle half the city hunting for that cupcake “because a day without it is wasted.” Once he spent ages telling her a story he invented about how her plastic whale crossed every ocean just to find its owner.

She listened, laughed, and fell in love. Not so much with him as with the version of herself he laid out before her. With the woman whose tiniest traits took on weight and meaning inside his world. Next to him she felt not merely loved. She felt seen.

The flame of passion flared toward the heavens. At that peak, in the glow of that all-consuming fire, they were both blinded. Because while the fire burns, no one watches the wood.

But every flame ends. Once the palace is finished and the ribbon-cutting fireworks fade, routine arrives.

The kind of everyday life where two people simply sit together and drink tea. In that ordinariness, architecture isn’t needed. There you just have to be. And that was the one thing Alexei couldn’t do.

Because he was terrified that in that ordinariness, once the smoke of his grand constructions dispersed, the woman would finally look at him. Truly look. Not at the architect, the archeologist, the magician. At Alexei himself.

And she would see… nothing remarkable.

Not a monster. Not a villain. Something worse. An ordinary, tired person. Someone with fears, with small weaknesses and habits. Someone who doesn’t hold every answer and sometimes wants silence simply because he’s exhausted.

Exposure was death to him. His greatest fear wasn’t being abandoned; it was being examined and hearing a polite, “Ah, so that’s what you are. Understood.”

So as soon as the flame began to weaken, as soon as that exposure threatened, he started dismantling the palace himself. He turned cold and critical, provoked arguments. He fabricated a reason to leave.

He began to destroy. Slowly, coldly, methodically.

He stopped seeing her uniqueness and catalogued her flaws instead. The dream about the ship in his retelling became “childish naivety.” The lemon cupcake—“a silly habit.” And once, in the middle of a fight, he threw at her with a chilly smirk:

— What is there even to talk about with you if the pinnacle of your happiness is a plastic whale?

He took the very treasures he had once unearthed and turned them into weapons against her. He did it so she herself would believe in her own “insignificance.”

It was easier that way. All the blame fell on her.

He always left first. And she stayed among the ruins, sifting through the shards of her enchanted world, crying and trying to understand when she had broken it all.

He left her with the guilt so no one would ever guess at his fear.