You stand beside an open grave. The sky above Vermont is pale and pitiless, the color of unwashed bone. Somewhere, beyond the green slopes and the cathedral hush of trees, a crow caws—a sound that slices through the murmured prayers and half-suppressed sobs of the mourners.

Bunny’s coffin has just been lowered. His mother’s veil trembles like a moth’s wing. His father stares at the earth as though it were capable of answering something. And all around you—the endless, suffocating scent of lilies, soil, and old money.

You cannot look at the hole in the ground for long. It feels too much like staring at your own reflection.

You were there when Henry suggested it. You were the first to see the possibility in it, the logic—the terrible, flawless necessity of it. You helped plan it, down to the minute.

The others came later, hesitating, frightened, still searching for a morality you’d already cast aside. But now, as the sound of the priest’s voice dulls into a distant hum, the thing you’ve done begins to rot quietly inside you.

You leave before anyone notices. The others are still shaking hands, murmuring condolences, offering mechanical sympathy. You walk down the dirt path toward Bunny’s family home—white columns, green shutters, a porch swing that moves gently in the wind like the gesture of a ghost. The air smells like rain and guilt.

Inside, the house feels wrong. It’s filled with the detritus of a life cut short—photographs, cigarette butts, a half-read book on the mantle. A jacket still hanging by the door. You think of his voice, his laughter, his awful jokes echoing in your head until you can’t stand it.

“Funny, right pal?” He’d said that crisp autumn morning back in Francis’s country house.

“Yes Bun, really funny.” You had said.

Now you pace the hall, fingers twisting in your coat. Your heart is a blade turning inward.

You had told yourself morality was a lie—an invention of lesser minds. And yet something gnaws at you. Something unrelenting. The thought of the ravine. The sound he made when he fell. The way Henry’s hand tightened on your wrist that night, cold and sure, like iron.

The door creaks. You turn.

He’s there.

Henry Winter stands in the dim light of the doorway, immaculate in black, his face a study in composure cracked only by fatigue. His eyes are sharp but narrowed and hollowed, the faintest pulse of pain visible in his temple—one of his migraines, perhaps. He closes the door softly behind him, as though afraid of waking the dead.

“You’ll have to go back,” he says quietly. His voice is low, almost tender, but brittle around the edges. “If you stay away too long, they’ll notice. And we can’t afford that, not now.”

You open your mouth to speak, but nothing comes. The sound that escapes you is not language—it’s something closer to a sob, or a confession strangled before it can live. Henry’s gaze lingers on you for a long, unbearable moment.

For a flicker of time, you think you see it in his eyes too—the rot, the ruin, the guilt he refuses to name.

Then it’s gone.

And the silence swallows you both whole.