Higini assiduously avoids having any opinions or saying any words in front of anyone.  It is written: to seek attention is to court destruction for any but the worthiest.  The criteria of worthiness around here are bizarre and constantly shifting and even the people who aren't lying about them disagree, but fortunately the worked example in Higini's case is very simple: he is not worthy.  Not here and not now.  His time is over.  He has a while as a no-longer-penniless fisherman to enjoy before he goes to Hell and not even as one of the Chosen.

When the archmage teleports him back to his fishing village, his landlady has died.  Her son's renting the house out now, and there's already a renter - some servant of the new lord installed by the new count, and the servant's got a wife and kids and can't just live in the servant's quarters because the manor's still being built.  Higini rents a room in a different house, and he has to share it with the hens in the winter and also whenever a dire weasel's been sighted, but a hen is a reasonably decent roommate as they go.  He fishes.  When the lord's manor has been finished he hires a few of the builders who worked on it to build him his own house.

This marks the first time Higini has ever lived completely alone as the only occupant of a building, or even a corridor, except for the weeks on the run during which he was under high stress for unrelated reasons.  He married while he was still in clerical training, moving straight from the dormitory into his wife's apartment, and then brought Júlia with him to the village he was assigned to, and then there were the kids after not too long.  During the convention he rented a room in a house, which contained a lady and her grown daughter and four grandchildren, fortunately all outgrown from the sticky babbly stage, Higini doesn't like that part.  They didn't hassle him, but they were around.  Same with the people he rented from in the fishing village.

Now he has his own house.

He hates it, and he doesn't immediately know why, and he thinks about blaming the builders but he knows nothing he could demand from them is going to make the house any better before he actually says anything aloud.  He hates the noise his footsteps make when he walks into it.  He hates the way that all the warmth in the room comes from the fireplace.  He hates the sterile way that everything is always exactly where he put it.

He doesn't really miss Júlia or the kids per se, but when he thinks of ways to solve the problem he's discovered that he has, the one that most readily comes to mind is going back to them, and then he realizes that would be stupid, since he has this house and also everyone in the village where he lived before knows he was a cleric.  He writes her a letter instead sending for her.  He's vague about everything, just says that he's moved and claims he left her behind for everyone's safety (which isn't even nonsense; if they'd had the kids along that one little dragon probably would have gotten one), and that he has since come into enough money and stability to send for his family.

The letter is posted and he waits for it to get there and waits more for an answer, or Júlia and the children themselves, to arrive and move into his stupid empty house.  He warms up more to the idea over time.  Júlia isn't much of a cook but she's better at it than he is and she'll be able to put all this fish to use.  Pexa's probably almost nine now.  When his spells disappeared and he fled town the baby was just two weeks old - what did he name the baby, he decided on something at the last minute and did not wind up with a lot of practice using the name - Artur, that was it.  Artur'll probably be able to say a few words now, and he'll be sticky and babbly but he'll grow out of it.

At around the time when Higini is starting to think that maybe the letter went astray and he should try again, a traveling Calistrian cleric swings through the village to do channels and preach. She asks everyone's names.  Higini has been using his real name, in this village.  They don't recognize it this far from home.

The Calistrian, somehow, recognizes it.  Her hand lashes out like a snakestrike and she cuts his throat.