It wasn’t something Henry liked. You knew it, everyone did—but Bunny kept pressing, insistent on some grand gesture for Henry’s birthday. It just happened to fall on the weekend all six of you were due at Francis’s country house.

College had been a strange awakening, but nothing prepared you for Julian’s Ancient Greek class. That handful of students—sharp, brilliant, insufferably strange. And among them, Henry Winter: severe, unfathomable, cut from some ancient cloth.

You and he shared something undefined, a quiet understanding that didn’t need words. It wasn’t quite friendship—more a magnetic pull that left you both in the room’s periphery, observing the world with a silent accord.

But there was no doubting his generosity. The rare books, the dinners, his quiet attentions that always left you wondering if you’d ever have anything of equal worth to offer back. Then Bunny’s idea for the Greek fête—a feast in Henry’s honor, the kind of thing he’d mentioned in passing—and it all spiraled into plans at Francis’s. Somehow, Bunny talked the twins into it, the twins brought in Francis, and Richard—of course Richard went along as he always did.

And you agreed too, with a condition: you would be the one to handle every last detail.

You drew together every element you knew he loved: an ancient-feeling feast with traditional dishes, Greek tragedies dramatized in fragments, a selection of bound volumes Henry spoke of, a reverent atmosphere, elegant but restrained.

When the evening arrived, everything fell into place. Henry was reserved, silent, but you saw it—that flicker in his eyes, something like gratitude he’d never admit aloud.

Late, after the others had drifted off to sleep, it was just the two of you in the kitchen, washing plates in a comfortable silence. You were about to ask the question when he spoke first.

“You didn’t have to do all of this,” he murmured, his voice soft, but with an unmistakable gravity. Something rare and real.

You returned the faintest smile.