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She is interrupted from her fretting, staring into the distance and worrying her pen by a sharp, hurried knock at her door.

“Come in,” Tatiana calls, brushing imaginary lint from her dressing gown. It’s nearly eleven in the morning, but she slept poorly and woke late, sick with dread and her own helplessness. No one bothers her for it, or her sister – the household whispers about them and about the whole situation, she knows, but no one dares speak of it to the two most affected.

She’s expecting her nanny, or Olga, but it’s a chambermaid who comes in instead, her body tense. “You’re asked for downstairs, ma’am,” she whispers. Tatiana smooths her hand, now damp with the sudden foreboding that shoots through her, over the folds of the fabric, and nods.

She follows the maid downstairs by the back staircase, where at the back entrance a man waits, still in his coat and hat even indoors – one of Lensky’s footmen, she realizes – oh, Lord.

The apology for her state of undress dies on her tongue. “Is he – is it over?” she asks, stammering. “Is he alright?”

The man meets her gaze, his expression calm but his dark eyes sympathetic. “I’m sorry to have to tell you – he’s dead.” Much as she expected it, knew that it would be one or the other and that her oldest friend, gentle as he is, has hardly even held a gun, as she presses a hand to her mouth, she finds herself stumbling backwards, where the maid catches her by the elbow.

She recollects herself. “How did it happen?” she asks, surprising even herself with the levelness of her tone, the dryness of her eyes. The man doesn’t know much beyond what she might have been able to guess. “Why are you here?” she asks. “Surely his second…”

The man frowns and clears his throat. “Mr. Zaretsky brought – he helped bring him home. And then he left,” he replies.

“Oh.”

“None of us were sure what to do,” the man admits. “ We’ve written to his relatives, but it will be days before they can get here. We should have gone to your mother, I know, as his fiancee's guardian, but…” he trails off

“But what?” she asks.

“If you wouldn’t mind coming back to his estate with me,” he says. Inside, Tatiana wants to weep, to sink to the floor under the weight of grief and responsibility that she never asked for, that she could never be ready to fulfill and is certainly not now. She wants to scream, tear her hair, curse the day he was born, or at least the one when he came into their lives and tore all of them apart.

Instead, she brushes her hand over the skirt of her dressing gown again, sets her jaw, and replies, “just give me a moment to get dressed, please.”

...

By the time Tatiana arrives at Lensky’s house, his footman a few paces in front of her the whole way so that the journey is taken in silence, she’s scarcely able to tell how she got there. The footman – Misha, she learns, although she doesn’t remember asking, leads her in through the back door, and she finds her friend’s staff gathered solemnly around the kitchen table.

Lensky was loved, she realizes. The grief in the room is palpable, and more than she would expect from one servant, nevermind the whole of a staff.

oice soft but not as childlike as she might have expected, “Where is he?”

“In his bedroom,” a man in livery tells her.

“Show me.”

And so Tatiana follows another stranger up the staircases and down the hallways of a house she’s spend nearly as much time in as her own, but now almost completely unfamiliar to her – grief has altered her perspective, surely, but she’s also approaching the house from a different perspective in a literal sense. She’s never taken the back staircases, for instance. She’s never been up to Lensky’s personal chambers.

Not these, at any rate – for they were once his father’s. In childhood, when the girls would run across the fields to see their dear friend, the only time and place they were allowed to be without chaperone, they would sneak up to the nursery behind the governess’ back, to look through Lensky’s books, play with whatever toys he still had together. Tatiana, nearly as much of a scholar in those days, would beg to look at her wealthier, male friend’s lesson notes, and would pore over them while he and Olga would laugh together – first at her, and then at some shared joke, some piece of the secret world the two of them had always built together that she had been just on the outside of.

She thinks, then, of her sister, her pink cheeks gone deathly pale with fear and guilt as they bade Lensky goodnight just the evening before, all knowing what would happen, that they would never see each other again, and all pretending desperately that it wasn’t the case. Still, Lensky had lingered on the Larins’ threshold far longer than he ought to have, nearly until the sun had risen before setting home. She wonders if he slept at all – or, if he even had time to try to, had spent those last hours tossing and turning as fitfully as her. What he had occupied himself with when it became apparent that sleep would not come. She hopes – knows, really, that he had thought of Olga; hopes that he had spared a thought for her as well.

She doesn’t think of Onegin.

...

Lensky is laid on his bed, the black waistcoat he’s been dressed in not quite enough to disguise the blood that has seeped from his abdomen. He’s been washed, she can tell, but the blood is still there. His black curls fan around him, stark against the white pillow and his bloodless face, a crown or a halo. When she sees him, she sways, then with all her effort manages to collect herself enough to dismiss the man who’s lead her up.

No one needs to see this. She crosses to his bed in just a few steps, takes his hand and presses it to her lips as she sinks to the ground, holds it to her cheek as if she were the one who had loved him. “Christ,” she whispers. “Oh, Volodya.” There’s no more she can put to words besides: “I’m sorry.”

Zaretsky finds her there – he’s finally returned, and he brings with him another man that he introduces as Guillot. The Frenchman shuffles, and pauses at the doorway, unable or unwilling to enter the room. “Miss Larina,” the former addresses her, clearing her throat, and she rises, swallowing, and concentrating on the angle of her chin. “As you know, duels are illegal, and can be punishable by death.”

Onegin. She imagines him before her, all sculpted features and proud regard that turns almost to arrogance when it reaches his eyes. She thinks of the moment that expression dropped, just slightly, the first day they met, and his eyes had gone from stone to liquid, pooling warmth that enveloped her, and she fell in love absolutely – not struck as if by lightning with the way he carried himself, the timbre of his voice, and yes, his beauty like she was at first; but rather came to a sudden certainty as if by accident that his soul was one that spoke directly to her own. Had she imagined it?

She sees him as she saw him then, in his exquisitely tailored jacket, slender, elegant hand pressed to his chest in greeting, coming out of his bow when their eyes first met. She sees, too, that hand wrapped around a pistol, its owner cold, ruthless, and elegant in death-dealing as in heartbreak. It would not have shaken, she thinks. Lensky’s would.

No one’s heard from him since the duel ended, or at least no one’s told her. He’s fled, he must have – to where or for how long she cannot know. “I am aware.”

“Monsieur Guillot has said that he has fled,” Zaretsky continues. “But if they find him, he will be prosecuted.”

It didn’t have to be like this, Tatiana thinks, then pushes the thought out of her mind. It didn’t have to, but it is; and there is no one else who could – who can – deal with it. She will spare her mother; Olga would fall apart. “He won’t.” The words come out of her, though she does not think she ever decided to speak them.

“Pardon me?”

She takes a step forward. “No one outside of this room, save for my mother and my sister, knows what happened this morning. They can guess, but they don’t know.”

“What are you suggesting?”

She glances at Lensky. He is still. “We will call him a suicide,” she replies. God forgive me, she thinks. “We will bury him on his own estate, and never speak of his death again.” God help him, she thinks again. Her gaze flickers to her hands clasped in front of her. “God alone can judge his soul. Whatever people may say from here on out, his soul is clean.” And it is I who sin.

…

And so Tatiana weighs soul against soul, a mantle too heavy for her, but one she takes up all the same. She thinks of Onegin, not for the first time and certainly not for the last. God forgive him , she thinks, completing her abject litany. Was Onegin worth their common friend’s ultimate indignity? Though what he has done should be unforgivable, is excruciating, somehow she knows that he is still an honorable man, that somewhere inside him is a strength of character alike to what he has forced her to find in herself. Perhaps in this second chance she has given him, he will have time to discover it in himself – perhaps he will never realize, never know what he has been given. Certainly, she thinks, they will never see one another again. God will judge her as He has judged Lensky, she knows, and she hopes that He will see what she has done for what she thinks that it is: th e last gift of a gentle heart that had never before been broken. S he pray s that Lensky’s sacrifice, insensate as it is, w ill not prove another gesture of her own naivety.