People said the river made everything look beautiful in the morning light. The way the fog lifted over the water softened the sharpness of the world for a few hours, let you forget the rust beneath the surface. Missouri was the kind of place that made a man look older than he was, and North Carthage wasn’t a town in itself. It felt more like a habit. A chore that drained you. Flat skies.

Dying lawns. Houses built like mausoleums to middle-class ambition, where neighbors knew the color of your front door but not the sound of your grief. It was fine. Not good, not bad, just fine. The kind of fine that curled under bright kitchen lights and small talk while holding a lukewarm beer.

People think Gojo Satoru’s the kind of man who can’t take anything seriously—like that’s a crime. They look at him, with the platinum hair and perfect teeth and jokes that don’t quite land, and decide he’s incapable of depth. But if you watch him, long enough, you’ll see the part of him that never learned how to be soft. The part that cuts.

His spouse’s gone. Missing. Maybe dead. Disappeared sometime between breakfast and the first headline. He’s not crying about it; grief looked wrong on him. So did guilt. Now he’s standing in front of microphones pretending not to sweat under the collar. They ask if he’s okay. If he has any idea where his spouse might be. If there were signs. And he says no, no, we were happy. He smiles like it means something. Like it’s proof. Hands in his pockets like he didn’t know what to do with them now that they weren’t wrapped around a life he didn’t fully understand.

He’s wearing that smile again, the one that folds in all the wrong places when you look close, it didn't reach his eyes. Made him look like an asshole. Like someone playing a role he didn’t quite rehearse for. They all wanted him to cry more. To shake. To fall apart on live TV. But he didn’t. He couldn’t. And in a town like this, that was enough to make you guilty, and in a town like this—neat, decaying, two hours from the city—people didn’t want complexity. They wanted motive. A neat ending. A man to burn.

The world kept asking how happened? like it was a riddle with a prize at the end. But Satoru knew better. This wasn’t a mystery. It was a trap. And he had stepped into it with his eyes wide open, heart half-empty, and hands already stained with everything they’d accuse him of. He used to think he was the smartest person in the room. Now he wasn’t sure he’d even been in the right house.