He pulled on a worn gray t-shirt, a pair of old sweatpants with a frayed left cuff, and his running shoes that probably had three hundred miles past their expiration date. He didn’t care. He drank a glass of water standing at the kitchen sink, looked out the back window at the yard, and then stepped out the front door into the cool Colorado morning. The street was empty. He liked it that way.
He ran four miles, same route every morning. Not because he needed to. He’d been out of active service for three years now, and nobody was grading his physical fitness anymore. He ran because it was the one hour of the day that belonged entirely to him. Before Lily needed breakfast, before client emails started piling up, before the world made its demands. Four miles of quiet pavement and his own thoughts.
When he got back to the house, he stretched on the front porch. And that was when he first noticed the truck. It was a massive blacked-out pickup, the kind that costs more than some people’s houses, parked halfway onto the curb in front of the old Henderson property next door. The Henderson house had been empty for six months. Ethan had watched it get repainted, refloored, landscaped. Professional crews working fast and expensive. Somebody with money was moving in.
A moving company was already unloading. Big furniture, a gym cage system, a heavy bag, a seventy-inch television still in the box. And leaning against the truck, phone in one hand, coffee cup in the other, wearing a black designer tracksuit that probably cost five hundred dollars, was a young man who looked like he’d been assembled specifically to irritate people. Twenty, maybe twenty-one. Built loud, even in his silence. The way he stood, the way he looked at everything around him like it was slightly beneath his interest, the casual arrogance radiating off him like heat off asphalt.
He glanced over at Ethan. Ethan nodded once, polite, brief. The young man looked him up and down, the old sweatpants, the faded shirt, the running shoes, and smirked. Then he looked away, already bored. Ethan went inside.
Lily’s lunch. Packed it in the blue container she’d had since sixth grade, the one with the small crack on the corner that she refused to replace because she said it has character, Dad. He made coffee, scrambled eggs, and toast with strawberry jam, her favorite, and had it on the table by the time she came downstairs in her school clothes with her hair still half-finished, earbuds already in, phone already in hand.