Say “that hurt” while it’s still small enough to talk about. Wait too long and it turns into a silent cold war.

Small injuries left unmentioned do not dissolve; they compress. Each one you swallow makes the next slightly heavier, until eventually the whole accumulated weight arrives in a single conversation that the other person cannot make sense of. By then the original thing is unrecoverable and what remains is distance nobody can explain.

Say it near the time, plainly and without a case attached: that landed badly, here is why. Keep it to the incident rather than the pattern. Early conversations are awkward for ten minutes; late ones tend to be about everything at once.