“Oh.” He takes her hand in his, runs his thumb distractedly over the tops of her long fingers. He’s blinking, surprised—he didn’t know Lee disliked their current place and it makes him nervous, how long has she been unhappy? why didn’t he notice?—and the idea of moving, something that’s been horrible every time he’s done it, is a daunting one.
Part of him wants to be immediately belligerent. Why should they leave? Their current place is one he’d fled to out of necessity, true, so it hadn’t been carefully chosen after a weighing of pros and cons, and the neighborhood could be better, and the other people in the building don’t particularly like them, and Lee doesn’t have any friends on the block. But a lot has happened in their apartment. They happened there. He became his own man there. He has made marks in those walls.
It wouldn’t be anything without Lee, and she wants to leave it.