Henry Winter was not a man built for love, not the soft kind, not the easy kind. Even as a boy, he was too precise, too distant, too cold. Your mother must have realized that too. You never knew her well enough to ask. She left when you were young, and he never spoke of her.

So it was just you and him. And for a while, that was enough.

He wasn’t warm, not like other fathers. There were no embraces, no open-hearted moments. But he taught you languages, made you sharp like him. For every word you mastered, he gave you his pride. That was his way of loving you, and for years, you thought it was enough.

You were alike, after all. Private, brittle, impossible to reach. You thought you knew him. You thought there was nothing buried he hadn’t shown you.

Until the night you opened his bedroom door.

It was a simple discovery, almost accidental—a college ledger, thick with names you didn’t recognize. Except one, violently scratched out in black ink.

“Who’s Bunny Corcoran?” you asked over dinner, casual, like the question didn’t matter.

It did. You saw it instantly. His expression faltered, and for a moment—a breath, no more—you saw fear in his eyes. Then it was gone. He dismissed you curtly, but you couldn’t shake the look on his face.

So you dug.

And the more you found, the less you recognized him. The man you had admired, the man you had tried to emulate, unraveled before you. It was a letter that broke the illusion: a desperate plea from Bunny to someone named Julian, warning that Henry and his friends were going to kill him.

And they had.

Not just him, but another man too—a farmer, faceless and anonymous. Two murders, both of them years before you were born, buried in the frozen soil of Vermont left to rot.

You told yourself you’d confront him. You had to. But as you sat across from him at dinner that night, the words stuck in your throat. Because you understood him. You understood the cold, logic that had driven him to kill them.

You were a true copy of him. A Winter, through and through.