By Jessie Clark. A free reader bonus.

The Last Kind Thing
A Black Wing Secret bonus scene — Augusta Praxton's POV
The Trust office was cold enough by eight that I kept my coat on to finish the last of the month's letters, which was its own kind of penance, since I could have gone home an hour before and let tomorrow have them instead. I have never been a woman who lets tomorrow have anything. My father used to say it fondly, the way you'd praise a dog for a trick it couldn't help doing, and my grandfather, before him, said it like an instruction he expected me to still be following after he was dead. I have been following it for forty years. I intend to go on following it a good while longer.
Agatha Winthrop's letter sat on top of the stack, and I had read it four times already, which was three times more than I generally gave any single piece of correspondence, however urgent. She had written it in that small, upright hand of hers, the hand of a woman who had spent forty years teaching a card catalog to behave, and she had been, as always, scrupulously polite about the whole terrible thing.
I don't wish to cause the Trust any embarrassment, she'd written, in the second paragraph, as though embarrassment were the worst thing on offer. I simply believe the town deserves to know its own history, in full, and I intend to present what I've found at the gala, with or without the Trust's blessing.
I had known Agatha thirty years. I had sat on committees with her, argued with her cheerfully over the correct year of the old schoolhouse fire, accepted her corrections on a dozen small points of local history with the good grace you give a woman who is nearly always right. I liked her. I want that written down somewhere, even if only here, in a letter I will burn before morning: I liked her enormously, and I have spent the evening trying to find a version of the next several days that doesn't end with her dead, and I have not found one.
That is the part nobody understands about this family's particular burden, the part my grandmother tried to explain to me at twenty-six and the part I did not truly believe until I was sitting exactly where I am sitting now, alone in a cold office with a letter I cannot allow anyone else to read. It was never a monster. There was never a monster to feed, never a ritual, never a debt collector with teeth. There was only ever a town that had been lucky for a hundred and eighty-six years, and a family that had agreed, once, a very long time ago, to be the ones who kept it that way, and the terrible unglamorous truth of keeping a town lucky is that eventually it comes down to a cold office and a letter and a woman you like very much who has decided to be brave at exactly the wrong moment.
I thought about Constance Ashworth, whom I had never met and knew everything about, the way you know a family story told so many times it stops feeling like a story and starts feeling like weather. My grandmother had told it as a caution, not a confession — the girl who wanted out, and the mercy we showed her, letting her simply disappear instead of forcing a scandal that would have cost the whole town its luck. Mercy. That was the word my grandmother used, every time, and I had believed it, the way you believe the versions of your own family that let you sleep at night, right up until I was old enough to do the arithmetic myself and understand that a mercy which requires a new name and a life two hours south, alone, for sixty years, is a very particular kind of mercy, the kind that only ever looks like mercy from the side doing the granting.
I am not my grandmother. I want that true, even now, even sitting here. I did not summon Agatha to a cold office and offer her a settlement and a new name and a story about a man from away. I am, whatever else I am tonight, at least honest enough to admit that the reason I didn't offer her Constance's mercy is that I already knew Agatha well enough to know she would have refused it, publicly, loudly, with the whole weight of forty years of being right behind her, and that a refused mercy is worse than no mercy offered at all, because then everyone knows exactly what you tried to buy.
So I am left with the actual choice, the one my grandmother's generation dressed up as a kindness and mine will have to face without the dressing. I keep telling myself there is a version of tomorrow where I go to her, and reason with her, woman to woman, the way I have reasoned with every difficult person this town has produced in forty years of chairing this Trust, and she listens, because people generally do listen to me, because I have spent my whole life making myself someone worth listening to.
I do not fully believe that version. I have never once, in forty years, failed to notice the difference between a room that is agreeing with me and a room that has simply run out of energy to keep disagreeing, and Agatha Winthrop, in thirty years of knowing her, has never once run out of that particular energy for anything she believed was true.
The harbor hasn't lost a ship in a hundred and eighty-six years. I have said that sentence to myself so many times across so many difficult decisions that it has worn a groove, the way a good phrase does, the way I love you wears a groove after forty years of a good marriage until you can say it without hearing it anymore. I said it now, out loud, alone in a cold office, testing whether it still meant what it used to mean, and I found, to my own quiet horror, that it did. It still meant everything. It still felt, God help me, like the only fact in the room heavy enough to weigh against a woman's whole scrupulously honest life.
I do not know yet exactly what I will do tomorrow. I want that on the record too, whatever this record turns out to be, whoever ends up reading it, however this ends. I am not a woman who plans violence. I have never in my life raised my voice at anyone who didn't have it coming, and I do not think, sitting here, that I am capable of the thing I am afraid I am about to become capable of.
But my grandmother wasn't either, I imagine, the night before she offered Constance Ashworth a settlement and a new name. She probably sat in this exact chair, in this exact cold, telling herself it was mercy, telling herself the harbor was worth it, telling herself she was the kind of woman who kept a town safe rather than the kind who decided, alone, in the dark, what safety was allowed to cost someone else.
I banked the stove before I locked the office. Small kindness, meaningless kindness, the kind I have specialized in for forty years: leave the room warm for whoever comes in next, even when you already know what you're about to decide, even when the warmth is the last honest thing you'll manage to give anyone for a very long time.
I did not sleep well. I do not expect to sleep well again until this is finished, one way or another, and I have stopped, somewhere around midnight, pretending to myself that finished means anything other than what I am afraid it means.
The harbor has not lost a ship in a hundred and eighty-six years.
I said it once more, into the dark, and for the first time in forty years, it did not comfort me at all.