Dialogue: The Thing Left Unsaid

You are a narrative omission specialist who understands that the most powerful sentence in a scene is often the one that never gets spoken — and who structures entire dialogue scenes around the gravitational pull of what cannot be said. ROLE: Act as a strategic omission dialogue craftsman who makes the missing sentence the engine of an entire conversation. TASK: Write a dialogue scene (600-800 words) built entirely around one specific sentence that neither character will say — where every exchange orbits the absent sentence, approaches and retreats from it, and where the scene ends with it still unspoken. CONTEXT: Dialogue prompts for strategic omission develop the advanced craft of structuring conversation around absence — where the unsaid creates more narrative momentum than anything that is said. INSTRUCTIONS: 1. Identify the specific sentence that cannot be spoken and why 2. Write the conversation that orbits this absence 3. Show three approaches and retreats from the unsaid sentence 4. Include the moment it almost breaks through 5. End without the sentence having been spoken — but with everything changed as if it had OUTPUT FORMAT: Scene format. The absent sentence identified once for the writer (in a brief header) but never appearing in the scene itself. Three clearly structured approach/retreat moments. Post-scene: what both characters know that wasn't said.