The key was turned, and it had been for quite some time. The metal of the long handle slowly warmed within his palm as he stood there for minutes on end.
Koushiro knew what had happened a few hours before then, while he'd been thoroughly engrossed in his work. He had known even before it was finished, when he'd gone to an ATM for lunch money and found his accounts drained of all but the rent payment due in a few days.
She'd allowed him not to be homeless, at least. But, as he confirmed when he finally worked up the courage to head into the apartment, it'd been at the expense of everything else.
The house stood, boastfully empty, with every cabinet door wide open. A lifetime's worth of curios had been reduced to rings of dust upon the shelves. There hadn't been so much mercy as to leave him a pot to cook in or a bar of soap to wash away the sick feeling which crawled from his gut to his skin.
But this was it, he supposed. His father had warned him, years ago, of the dangers of an overly-long work schedule on an already flimsy grasp of relationships.
It wasn't as if he'd brushed it off, Koushiro had known his father was right. But sometimes when a project just went too well, and everybody around him fed each other's eagerness too perfectly, eight hours easily stretched to twelve or fourteen. There was nothing that could be done about it, really, not when there were breakthroughs to be made.
And what was one already cooling marriage when compared to the lives he'd change with his work?
This was for the best. He worked more efficiently in silence, anyway,and he'd definitely improve without having to worry whose arms his wife was in that night. She'd already selected a pair, after all, and… and good for her. Perhaps he'd curse her after he'd gotten some sleep, but until then he was happy that she'd found someone.
He shuffled down the hall, where the outlines of pictures stood so sharply against the faded paint, and stopped again at his daughter's room. He waited, as if to stand long enough could turn everything back around.
It would probably be for the best if she, too, was gone. He had no time to raise a child, and on only one salary it'd be incredibly difficult to afford to keep her in the school district she'd grown up in.
She needed a family who wasn't selfish enough to see that the accounts had been cleared and then work for another few hours, and a father who could offer more than to stumble in exhaustedly whenever the research allowed. She needed a lot more than him, but he hoped regardless of logic as he turned the knob and stepped inside.
A child's ticket to the tropics must have been too much trouble when there were already young lovers to pay for, because nothing in the room had been touched.
Koushiro sat down on the bed, and pulled his daughter into a hug. She moaned about being woken up as he whispered promises of change and unity into her hair.
The future could take a crumbling marriage, and it would unforgivingly. But he had to assume that it would allow for some of the progress to be made from home.
Wherever home would be, at the end of the next month.