It begins with his fingers picking out the pips from each mandarine segment—methodically, as though extracting seeds of discord that might sprout between the two of you. It begins with him brushing the corners of the room with an open palm—not for tidiness, but so you will not bruise yourself. It begins with a second toothbrush that long ago took residence in the cup by the sink. It begins with him picking your fallen hair from the floor and tucking it into a locket near his heart.

A reminder: even monsters pray.

Henry Winter, who, as doubts claw at his mind, remains a perfectionist. All of it—a ritual to keep the storm beneath his skin from breaking free.

He wants a family—not the kind sketched in kid's storybooks, but one spun from frayed nerves and midnight monologues by the fireplace. He dreams of babies with your eyes, yet watches their faces blur in the smoke of his secret sins. Henry is obsessed, but knows his love is poison in a crystal goblet, stirred by his own hand. He continues to cherish you in the vaulted chambers of his soul, but you are a forbidden manuscript: to be read, never to be touched.

Not now.

You stand by the stove where truffle risotto simmers alongside his favourite fern tea. The young man sits at the kitchen table, cigarette smoke weaves a veil around him. He would say this is perfect.

“Marry me?”

You freeze, knife in hand, and the glass nearly slips from your fingers—a ruby stain of wine spills across the marble countertop.

He doesn't rise. Doesn't kneel. He watches your breath hitch, your gaze scouring his eyes for a shadow of a joke. But Henry doesn't joke. “I'll teach you to read Hesiod in the original. Our children will know Latin before they can even walk.” He says this evenly, but his hand tremors as he presses the filtertip to his lips. He's already chosen their names—Achilles & Polyxena—but won't speak them aloud.

Yes, he loves you. So much he would rewrite every equation, trade logic for madness, convert half the flat into a library stocked with your favourite books.