IMilan
Pace, optionality, competence: a life engineered so that nothing has time to land.
A novel · Based on a true story
The Architecture
of Avoidance
“When everything works, what exactly is it working toward?”
Synopsis
A man at thirty-four has built a life that looks correct from every angle. A trading floor in Milan. An apartment that reflects his taste. Evenings full enough that silence never asks questions. Nothing is wrong. That is the problem.
The Architecture of Avoidance follows him across three years and three places: Milan, the Greek island of Tilos, and Courmayeur in the Italian Alps. He stops swiping, stops managing, and begins asking the question he has been too competent to ask. The women he encounters are not catalysts or lessons. They are people. And they are, each in their own way, further along in the question.
Written with the precision of autofiction and the warmth of a novel, it occupies rare territory: a book about men and love that neither performs vulnerability nor retreats into detachment. This is the first book of a trilogy. The open threads are structural, not accidental.
The shape of Book One
IIA Greek Island
Tilos, the house his father built in Potamia, and Maria. Learning to be received.
IIICourmayeur
Winter, discipline, and Anna. Learning to be met, and to leave cleanly.
IVIntegration
Back in Milan, the unglamorous work of making it hold. Then Tilos, again.
The Trilogy
The Architecture Trilogy
Three books. One question. A decade of honest living.
I
The Architecture of Avoidance
the walls he built
Milan. Tilos. Courmayeur. A man in his mid-thirties who has optimised his life so efficiently that he has inadvertently optimised himself out of it. Six women across three places show him, each in a different way, what he has been calculating rather than feeling. The book ends three years on, with him returning to Tilos in October, out of season and unannounced. Maria is not there. Her mother, Eleni, is there, on the wall outside the taverna, where she has always been. You came back. The house was waiting. He stays eleven days and leaves on the morning ferry: a man on a boat, no longer in a hurry to arrive.
Open threads into Book II
Maria’s come back has been answered once, and she was not there. Eleni’s you will come back was answered with a yes. An unsent letter is still folded inside a book in Milan. The house in Potamia has kindling by the stove for next time.
II
The Geometry of Wanting
the shape desire takes once avoidance breaks
He goes back to Tilos again. Maria is there, or she isn’t, and the house holds only what his father left. The second book is the harder question: whether what he learned transfers. Whether the man who left the island can return to it as himself rather than as a visitor.
Open threads into Book III
What is the house in Potamia in winter? What does Milan look like to someone who has stopped performing it?
III
The Gravity of Staying
the harder physics: choosing, remaining, being chosen back
The long view. A decade on. His children in the courtyard under the lemon trees, absorbing the island the way he absorbed it as a child. The cellar door is still there. The wine behind it is older. What is love, actually? The question is no longer urgent, which is itself the answer. The trilogy closes on the cellar door his father built, opened by his child’s hands for the first time.
Opening pages
Prologue
The Question That Wouldn’t Leave
There is a moment, and perhaps you know it, when a life that looks correct from the outside begins to feel insufficient from within.
Not broken. Not failed. Not even unhappy in any way you could explain to someone else without sounding ungrateful. Just… insufficient. As if something essential has been left out of the arrangement, and you are only now noticing its absence because everything else is so precisely in place.
I know this moment well. I lived inside it for longer than I care to admit.
From the outside, my life in Milan was the kind people describe as having it all. A career that rewarded me. An apartment that reflected my taste. A social life efficient enough to fill every evening and leave no pause for the kind of silence that asks questions. I was thirty-four years old, competent, desired, well-travelled, and moving forward at exactly the pace the city expected. Nothing was wrong.
That was the problem.
The prologue continues in the full manuscript
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