Absolutely beautiful, but sad. Is pathetic right, no that isn’t. The main character, Miles, was a bit of a melancholy, jaded sort. You made him endearing and I rooted for that middle-aged bloke. I was disappointed it wasn’t in the cards for a happy ending. But that fit. Once a course is set, its path is pretty much inevitable.

Earlier in the piece, the thing that stood out was your line, “He had a past but had left it where it belonged, he said, in the past . She liked that, she thought.” Kind of a simple thing you said there, but in its context it really stood out as a truism. Ironic then, how she Suzanne/Ann got him to bring it all to the surface only to judge him. He knew all along where to leave that past.

Oh there were other lines I loved, but you already know where the good writing is, pretty much throughout the whole piece. The characterization I expect to be first rate from you, your understanding of behavior astute, but your setting work absolutely stood out in this piece. That’s a trick I plan to learn from you.