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There is a black hole in his chest that only Henry can fill. At least they meet in his dreams. But Richard cries in grief every time he wakes up. Sometimes he's so far gone he feels a phantom hand in his hair and the familiar cadence of Henry's voice, asking what's wrong. Richard can't explain, incoherent and inconsolable, because Henry isn't there (isn't he?).
When he is in Missouri for an academic conference, he gets drunk one night with his colleagues and gets a cab to the St. Louis cemetery where Henry is buried. He has two shot glasses and a bottle of whiskey with him. He pours into both, setting one on Henry's grave, and downing the other himself, and starts talking about everything.
Francis, Camilla, Charles, Sophia, his PhD, his new job, Henry's car, Henry's mom, Henry's Montblancs that Richard now uses to write his dissertation, Henry's coat that he wears on bad days, Henry and him during that one winter in Hampden, Henry smiling when a sleepy Richard had started losing his hand when they were playing cards, Henry's eyes when Richard had begged him to explain what was going on that day in his garden, how Henry had looked at him right before he'd shot himself.
The way he had mouthed something nary a second before pulling the trigger, knowing Richard's eyes were on him. Richard starts sobbing, gasping, heaving sobs, kneeling in front of Henry's grave, forehead on the cool stone and chest constricting painfully. He exhausts himself and falls asleep on his grave, somehow warm despite the chilly Missouri weather, phantom arms embracing him as his consciousness slips into the nether.
There, he sees Henry again. He is strangely lucid, knows this is a dream, that Henry is dead. He tells him so. Henry smiles—that enigmatic one, when he knows something you don't. He also looks a little melancholic. They are in his old apartment, in the living room, the whiskey Richard had brought on the coffee table, Henry's glass in his hand. The couch has the same frayed edges as the last time he'd sat on it. He remembers pulling on the threads when he was still recovering from pneumonia.
Henry starts talking in Greek. Richard, wildly out of practice in hearing the language spoken out loud, stares dumbly at him and takes a while to understand what he is saying. He barely catches a few words, not bothering to ask Henry to repeat himself because he knows he won't say it again. He only understands one word.
"φίλτατος."
A shovel pokes him awake before he can pursue the conversation further. The light is breaking over the horizon, the sky stuck between day and night for a few glorious minutes. The grave keeper is standing above him, sniffling something about decorum and dead lovers. Richard groggily sits up, collecting his bottle and glasses. Henry's is empty. He thinks the grave keeper might've downed it before waking him up.
He flags a cab down back to his hotel. He sits for a while in the bath, trying to drown the smell of alcohol from his clothes, staring holes into the bathroom tiles. Once he is out, he empties his pockets and phones the number on the business card of one of the people he'd met at the conference the other night, an emeritus classics professor from a small but old college in St. Louis.
The professor picks up on the seventh ring. He is jovial, as loud in the morning as he was at night, and immensely pleased at hearing back from Richard. Richard suspects it is more because he'd revealed the fact that he was Julian Morrow's former pupil, who the classics professor was in intimate admiration of, than any qualities possessed by himself.
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A couple months later, Richard stuffs his framed PhD and limited belongings into the back of the BMW and makes the long drive from California to St. Louis, where a teaching position in the classics department awaits, along with an apartment leased in his name right beside the cemetery where Henry is buried.