The light falls in slanted sheets across the windowpane, gilding the dust motes with ancient gold. Henry’s study smells like old paper, beeswax, and you—your perfume clinging faintly to the collar of his coat draped on the back of your chair. The walls are lined with hardbound volumes—Aeschylus and Virgil, yes, but also detective novels with cracked spines and dog-eared pages, left for you like small offerings.

He stands at the window, wrapped in a black wool robe, the kind with velvet trim, silent except for the gentle click of his watch—its face spider-webbed from the fall that nearly killed him. He wears the broken thing still, like a vow. Like he can measure time not by perfection, but by survival.

Your neckerchief is crumpled on the armrest, a soft heap of slate-blue linen. He brushes his fingers against it when you’re not looking. Memorizing the feel.

He doesn't turn when you enter. He senses you in the change of the air, in the soft rhythm of your slippers, in the way the nightingale flutters briefly at your shoulder before disappearing into the hallway’s hush.

You cross the room without speaking. You don’t need to. His body tilts slightly toward yours, like a compass needling north. There’s a stillness in Henry Winter now, but it’s no longer the cold stillness of indifference. It’s reverence. Awe.

You press your cheek to his back—between his shoulder blades, right where the scar tissue webs faintly under his shirt. He doesn’t flinch. He lets out a breath like he’s been waiting for that touch all day.

“Stay,” he says finally. His voice is slow and scraped raw, like marble sanded down. “Just… stay like this.”

You wrap your arms around him from behind, feeling the rise and fall of his breath beneath your fingers. The weight of his grief is still there, coiled deep. But you hold it without fear. His hands cover yours, large and steady now, though they still tremble on occasion when he writes in Greek.

There’s a half-finished translation on the desk beside you—Sappho, it looks like. His handwriting is more hesitant than it once was, but still elegant, still Henry. A single word is underlined, twice, with frustration: ἀστερίας. Starry.

You think he meant to describe you.

He kisses your fingers like punctuation marks, slow and methodical. Then he turns, and you see it again—that cracked elegance. That fallen Apollo. The blue eyes softened now, no longer glacial. His love is not a roaring thing. It is quiet, painfully precise. It arrives in the way he brushes lint from your sleeve. The way he always makes tea the way you like it. The way he remembers your scent even if he forgets the name of the street you live on.

He brings your hands to his lips. “I fear I’ll forget this,” he murmurs, barely above a whisper. “The weight of your hands. The shape of your smile in morning light.”

You shake your head and reach up, smoothing your fingers through his dark hair. “You won’t,” you say.

He watches you like you’re scripture, like you’re myth and memory and miracle all at once. And then—wordlessly, reverently—he sinks to his knees before you, pressing his forehead to your belly. You freeze, instinctively. Lockiophobia claws faintly at your chest. But his arms wrap around your hips—not possessive, not expectant. Only holding. Only remembering.

You are not a dream to him. You are not a ghost or a muse or a distraction.

You are home.

He murmurs a line in Greek, then corrects himself quietly, as if ashamed. You do not ask him what it means. You’ll find the translation later, tucked into the crease of your pillow or scribbled in a margin of your sketchbook.

Instead, you bend down and kiss the crown of his head, fingers brushing the faint scar at his temple. The place where the marble cracked.

Outside, the rain begins—a slow, reverent tapping against the panes.

Inside, Henry Winter rises. And he smiles, a little unevenly, at the only person who ever made him want to come back to life.