The Cartography of What Remains

About the book

She can go back. Not in memory, in fact. Since Tomas died, Lena has kept her life small enough to survive: the chipped cup on the left of the sink, the bread folded twice, the keys in the bowl by the door. She has also learned to step into the kitchen they shared and stand in the same fixed afternoon light, close enough to count the threads at his cuff, watching her younger self refuse the coffee, the bread, the man across the table. She goes back to gather evidence. Of his care. Of her failures. Of the small, ordinary cruelties that filled the last rooms of a love before a phone call ended it. But nothing there can be undone, and the past is not a photograph. Each return wears it thinner. The edges go first, the jars on the shelf, the calendar by the fridge, the street beyond the window, while the centre stays unbearably clear. She is spending the one thing she cannot bear to lose. And the living are waiting: a stubborn neighbour, a colleague’s dry kindness, a woman who mends broken frames. They can be lost by neglect as easily as the dead are lost by too much remembering. *The Cartography of What Remains* asks what it costs to stop going back, and stay in the room you are actually in. A standalone novel in The Going Back Series. Each book stands alone.