Summer, 1990.

The aftermath of Bunny Corcoran was not a storm that passed, but a poison that settled into the bone. By the time Julian Morrow simply ceased to exist—erased from the world as though a god had taken an ink eraser to the page of reality—and Charles Macauley had pressed the cold, accusatory snout of a revolver to Henry’s temple, the air in Vermont had become unbreathable. It was thick with the scent of rotting leaves, secrets buried in shallow graves, and the metallic tang of old dread. For Henry, the last tether to anything resembling salvation was you. You were not his redemption—he had long since abandoned faith in such concepts—but you were his final, fragile piece of sanity. A single, unbroken china cup left on a shelf in a house that had otherwise collapsed into rubble.

So when he left, he did not look back. The rearview mirror of the borrowed car showed only a smudge of green and gray, the ghost of Hampden dissolving into the haze of a humid July afternoon. You went with him because there was nowhere else in the world that could hold you both. Seven years have now unspooled like a bolt of silk from that trembling departure, and you have been living, breathing, sleeping in the soft amber heart of the English countryside.

The estate Henry acquired was a masterpiece of decadent decay. It reminded you, with a pang so sharp it was almost sweet, of Francis’s aunt’s country house—that sprawling, wisteria-drowned manor where, for a few incandescent summers, the five of you had played at being ancient souls in a modern world. Those getaways had been a kind of heaven, or at least a convincing counterfeit. There had been wine warmed by the sun, cigarettes smoked on the veranda at midnight, and a dizzying, illicit freedom that sang in your blood like champagne. You had all believed, for a handful of golden weeks, that beauty could inoculate you against tragedy. Now, of course, you knew better. Beauty is not a shield; it is a mirror. It shows you exactly what you have lost.

But here, in this new life, you have allowed yourself to sink into the idea of withdrawal. Henry has become a scholar of silence, and you his acolyte. The house itself is a museum of haunted elegance. Its bones are old oak and worn stone; its lungs are the drafts that whisper through long, leaded-glass windows. Inside, a chaos of antiquity reigns: Etruscan vases stand next to Victorian fossils, and the walls are crowded with Romantic landscapes in tarnished gilt frames. But the heart of the collection lies in the Ancient Greek paintings—frescoes of gods with almond eyes and fatal smiles—and the miniature marble statues that cluster on pedestals like a frozen chorus. Here is a small, vicious Apollo, bow drawn. There, a pensive, battered Athena. A Narcissus so flawless it hurts to look at. They are not decorations. They are incantations. Henry surrounds himself with them as if their long, calm gaze can leach the remorse from his marrow.

Outside, the garden is a different kind of temple. It sprawls in untamed opulence, a sea of grass that waves and ripples like an inland ocean. Foxgloves rise like rosy spires; lavender spills over the gravel paths in fragrant, violet avalanches. An old sundial, pitted with verdigris, marks the hours in Roman numerals, though the gnomon casts a shadow so crooked it seems to lie about the time. And here, on this particular afternoon in the high, lavish summer of 1990, you lie stretched across the grass like an ode to indolence. A volume of Keats is open on your stomach, though you have not turned a page in an hour. Instead, you watch the clouds construct and deconstruct their white cathedrals against the impossible blue of the sky. A bee drones its low, hypnotic liturgy. The scent of cut hay and honeysuckle braids itself into the warm air. You feel, for a long and suspended moment, like a figure in a painting yourself—a nymph.