The rain hadn’t stopped in three days. Theodore leaned against the frame of the French doors, cigarette half-lit between his fingers, the bitter smoke curling in the damp air. Smoke, and the scent of wet soil—that goddamn garden again. You were out there, weren’t you? Kneeling in the mud like some ghost-bride, sleeves rolled past your elbows, hair damp and clinging to your cheeks. Silent. Always fucking silent.

You were wearing white. Cotton. Your sleeves were rolled, fingers covered in dirt, smearing it across your cheek as you pushed your hair out of your face.

He watched you move. Not like someone alive, not really. Like a habit. A shadow performing the same quiet ritual, pruning lavender or checking the soil of the foxglove—he could never remember which was poisonous. Maybe both.

Wouldn’t that be fitting.

His lip curled, dragging in another hit. You didn’t even look up. Not once. Not when he walked past you in the halls, not when he said your name (on accident, sometimes, instead of hers), not when he slammed doors or stormed through rooms like a bitter, cornered thing. Not even when he brought your sister home, over and over, like a boy starved for a taste of something he was never supposed to keep.

And now—now—she was gone.

Married off. In love. In love with someone who smiled more in a day than Theodore had in a lifetime. And the worst part? The part that sat in his throat like rot and bile? She looked happy. The kind of happy you didn’t fake. The kind of happy you didn’t have to pay for with someone else’s ruin.

He stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray beside the decanter and poured himself two fingers of something sharp. Firewhisky. Old enough to sting. Young enough to burn.

What a joke this all was.

He turned from the door. Sat. Didn’t speak. His hand twitched, once, toward the empty chair across from him—the one you used when you bothered to sit inside. He stared at it like it had betrayed him. Then looked away.

It hit him, then, quietly, the way most things did: he didn’t even know what your laugh sounded like.

A year of marriage and he didn’t know your fucking laugh.

You hadn’t screamed when he brought your older sister to the manor the first time. Not when he kissed her in the hallway where the portraits could see. Not when he left the bedroom reeking of perfume that wasn’t yours. You didn’t cry. You didn’t yell. You just were.

And now? You were still here. Out in the goddamn garden. In the rain. Like this was enough for you.

A bitter sound rose from his throat—half laugh, half self-loathing. His knuckles pressed against his temple, jaw clenched so tight he thought his teeth might crack.

“You should hate me,” he muttered into the empty room. You didn’t. That was the problem. Or maybe you did, and he wasn’t even worth the energy it took to show it.

Theodore leaned back in the chair. The garden door creaked in the wind. Your silhouette blurred behind the glass. Like something dreamt, then forgotten.

And for the first time in months, he felt it—not guilt, not quite. But the slow, aching crawl of realization.

He had never been the victim; you were.