For some reason, it doesn’t surprise me.
I study his photo carefully, letting each detail settle in my mind. His eyes are dark and steady, the kind that miss nothing, framed by faint crow’s feet that hint at years of watching tooclosely. His nose is sharp, almost aristocratic in its angles, balanced by black, slightly wavy hair and a full, thick beard that gives his face weight.
My hand drifts unconsciously to my own beard, brushing over the coarse stubble as a faint pang coils in my gut.
Jealousy. That was the feeling I couldn’t name before—the one that had eluded me. The strange familiarity it carries. The way his words about her radiate warmth and fascination, an intimacy that should never exist in a teacher’s report, yet pulses clearly through every line.
Was there something between them? Or am I letting my mind crawl down a wrong, dangerous path?
I scroll through the report, eyes scanning the lines until they catch on another word, bolded in black.
Cause of death: Suicide.
The folder expands, and I click without hesitation. The photos load in slow sequence, each one more disturbing than the last—the limp body of William hanging from a rope, the wooden chair toppled beneath him, faint scuff marks on the floor where he must’ve struggled before giving in.
Whywould he kill himself?
My jaw clenches as I lean over the table, shoulders tense, eyes scanning every detail with surgical focus. Every file, every note, every tenuous thread of connection demands my attention. I pull them in, piece by piece, needing it all, craving it all. The curiosity inside me refuses to ebb. It grows, searing through my chest, gnawing at my thoughts.
I open an archived article, one of those old digital clippings buried deep in forgotten corners of the web. The text is brief, impersonal, like the reporter is afraid to touch the story too closely.
He hung himself not long after his daughter drowned in the lake. A single sentence that says everything and nothing at once.
He’d been a single father, doing his best after losing his wife to illness. Trying to build something human out of grief. Trying to live.
But the words slip through me like smoke. The article says the daughter drowned, yet it never mentions how or why. No details. No clarity. Just another tragedy smoothed over with empty phrasing.
It leaves me restless. Something doesn’t fit, like many things in Iris’s past.
Gravemoor unfurls in my mind as I scroll through the few sparse images attached to the file. A desolate place perched on the northern edge of the world. Grey skies stretch endlessly, a ceiling of cold that presses down on everything beneath it. Trees stand skeletal and bare, stripped of life, their branches forever reaching for a spring that never returns. Snow drifts across the landscape, fleeting yet persistent, never truly gone, leaving the ground a patchwork of white and decay. The air itself feels heavy, thick with silence, impossible to warm against, as if the land refuses the touch of life.
A truly depressing place to live in.
The drowning happened in spring, the article reports. The river ran free, not frozen, but its waters always cut cold, biting like knives. Who would willingly dive in? Especially a child?
A warning flashes in my skull, screaming Code Red, urging me to stop, to step back before I fall too far into this pit. I ignore it. My hand moves on its own, pencil scratching across a scrap of paper, jotting down names, dates, fragments of a story that refuses to align.
The case is marked solved. Nothing suspicious, nothing between the lines of the polished, official words. A dead wife, a drowned daughter, and then a man who couldn’t bear the weight anymore.
A chain of sorrow stretching across one family like a curse.
I collapse nearly all the tabs on William, leaving only his original file open. His photo lingers on the screen, frozen in a stillness that unsettles me. There’s a strange peace in his face, as if the worst had already come and gone long before the rope ever found his neck.
The file lists a next of kin—a brother, Bennett Johnes. It takes only seconds to pull up his record. The truth flickers through me like a single, sharp beam cutting through thick fog when I see that he’s alive.
Not everyone who touched Estella’s past ended up dead.
Bennett’s profile fills the screen. Professor at the University of London. His photograph captures a man sculpted by time and intellect—features cleaner, sharper than his brother’s, glasses perched neatly on the bridge of his nose, a faint, controlled smile brushing his lips. He has traveled far from that frozen, forgotten village that once held him in its grip.
I scribble his address, university, and contact details into my notebook. Then, I close every tab except the one that ignited this spiral, the one that started it all.
The printer hums to life when I press the button, a low, steady roar filling the quiet room as paper slides out, one sheet after another. While it runs, I open a drawer and pull out a new yellow folder, empty and clean. On the blank sticker at the top, I take a pen and write her name with slow, deliberate strokes.
The printer keeps spitting out pages of her records, photos, fragments of a life torn apart and reassembled in secrecy. I gather them all, stacking them neatly before sliding them into the folder. Then, I plug in a flash drive and transfer every file, every scan, every digital trace, cutting and pasting them all in one place.
No one else will ever see this. This will remain my investigation—mine alone.
As the final file loads, I lean back, my eyes flicking down to the notes beside the keyboard.
