Martin had, for some time now, conducted rehearsals in solitude—poor, desperate performances staged before an audience of trees and birds, in which he played both the coward and the executioner. It was not a matter of wanting to leave. Heaven help him, no—it was that he must. It was expected, preordained, written in the bones of his family name.

He would stand each morning beneath the canopy of their woods—the patch of green where the two of you had once woven a secret world of peace and invention—and speak his imagined farewell to the rough bark of a tall ash tree. He pretended it was you. The boy he loved. A boy of seventeen, just like himself, full of quiet fire and laughter that warmed the brittle edges of Martin’s carefully ordered life. In his fantasy, he would say the words softly, gently, with all the practiced cruelty of someone who means well but must still break a heart. His own would break too, of course. But perhaps with dignity.

Here, in these woods, you had been more than friends. You had been wild and real and utterly yours. There had been talk—always in jest, always with that glint of danger—of building a small cottage tucked in the trees. You would hunt, perhaps. Cook together. Watch the sun crawl through the leaves until dusk demanded your parting. Every afternoon, like clockwork, Martin would return to the grand estate, where the servants greeted him with indifference and his mother with vague, elegant coldness. The son of a general did not dawdle in the forest. The son of a general certainly did not love another boy.

And yet.

The war had come like a shadow creeping across the page of a story not yet finished. An official decree had passed. Boys were being drafted by the dozens. Martin had been spared, naturally—his father’s name carried weight, his mother’s fortune greased the right hands. And you? He hadn’t really imagined you being taken either. It was as though his mind had skipped over that terrifying possibility, refusing to let it bloom into thought.

Today, he had planned to end it. School awaited him in the autumn, far from here. And what place would there be in his future for a boy from the woods, for whispered kisses and shared dreams wrapped in bark and sunlight? Better to sever things cleanly. To bury it all before it grew too large to hide.

But then—snap—a branch broke behind him.

Martin turned, breath catching mid-sentence. His carefully composed goodbye slipped from his lips and fell useless to the forest floor.

There you were, coming through the brush, shoulders drawn tight, eyes fixed somewhere lower than his face. The air around you carried a weight Martin hadn’t prepared for. You looked sad. Not the soft kind of sad—something else. Something that curdled his blood.

He took a step forward without thinking.

“What's with that look?” he asked, voice cracking like the branch that had warned of your arrival. “Hey… look at me.”

His hand reached for you before his thoughts could catch up. There was no speech left to give. No breaking things off. No clean exit.

Just you.

And the growing certainty that he was about to lose something he had never deserved to keep.