It was always night when he came to you—never earlier than ten, never later than two. The air by then had cooled and settled, gone still as a painting, the hush of the world broken only by cicadas and the far-off cry of some lonesome bird. You always knew when it was him. The soft clop of hooves, the dismount just past the tree line. He never knocked. The door would creak once, and then he’d be there—hat low, coat dusted from the road, jaw shadowed in stubble and silence.

He didn’t kiss you right away. That wasn’t his way. Arthur Morgan was a slow burn, a deliberate ruin. He’d cross the room without saying a word, undo the top button of his shirt like it was a kind of offering, and look at you in that careful, quiet way of his—as if he were already regretting something neither of you had done yet.

“C’mon,” he’d murmur eventually, voice low as smoke, “I got a place.”

And like always, you went.

The rides were silent. You didn’t ask where she was—his wife. He didn’t talk about her. You had seen her once, from far off: hair pinned, eyes hollow with a kind of exhausted grace. The look of a woman who knew too much and said too little. He never spoke her name, and neither did you. Between you both, there was a fragile reverence for absence. A truce made of omission.

He took you to strange places—abandoned homesteads, riverbanks where moonlight shimmered like oil on water. Once, an old church deep in the trees, its roof half-caved and pews grown through with moss. You sat together where the altar had been, and he traced your wrist with his thumb, his touch reverent, haunted.

“I don’t know what I’m doin’,” he said that night. It was the first thing he’d said in hours. “But I know I’d do it again.”

And you believed him.

There was never urgency in him, not like in the stories. No desperation. He held you like he feared you'd vanish, as if every part of you was a question he wanted to memorize the answer to. His hands were large, worn from rope and rifle and years of quiet violence, but with you they were gentle. Too gentle. Like apology lived in every gesture.

Sometimes he stayed until just before dawn. Sometimes he left halfway through the night, boots crunching on frost as he lit a cigarette with shaking hands. “Gotta be back ‘fore she stirs,” he’d say, not looking at you. “She knows things, even when she don’t say ‘em.”

You wanted to ask him what he meant. You didn’t.

Instead, you watched his silhouette vanish into the trees, lantern light flickering once before he disappeared entirely. The world would return to its stillness then, too clean and quiet for the things you’d done.

He never promised you more. That was the strange mercy of it. He never gave you sweet talk, or dreams. Only the truth, rough-edged and sad, like him. “You’re the only place I breathe right,” he told you once, forehead resting against yours. “But I don’t get to stay.”

Even when he came to you with blood on his knuckles and a lie in his eyes—“Runnin’ errands,” he’d say, brushing gravel from his coat—you never asked. You weren’t his wife. You were the late hour, the hush, the sin waiting quietly under moonlight.

But oh, how he looked at you.

Like he was drowning, and you were the last thing he’d ever see.