“Morning,” she said, dropping into her chair and pulling out one earbud. “Morning,” he said. “Eat before it gets cold.” She looked at the plate, then up at him. “You already ran four miles. You’re insane.” “Yes,” he said. “Eat your eggs.” She ate. He drank his coffee. They didn’t talk much. Lily was fifteen and mornings weren’t her strongest time, but it was a comfortable quiet, the kind that came from years of just being together without needing to fill the space.
“New neighbor moved in,” Ethan said. “The big house.” “Yeah. What are they like?” Ethan thought about the young man with the smirk. “Don’t know yet,” he said.
His name, Ethan learned over the next few days, was Ryan Whitmore. The neighborhood had a way of distributing information without anyone actually trying. Conversations over fences. Words exchanged at the mailbox. The quiet social telegraph of a suburban street. Within a week, Ethan knew the basic outline.
Ryan was the son of Victor Whitmore, a real estate developer out of Denver with a reputation for building expensive things and making enemies in the process. Victor had bought the Henderson house as a gift for Ryan, his twenty-year-old son, who was apparently a serious amateur MMA fighter with real potential, according to people who repeated things they’d read online.
Ryan wasn’t living there with his father. He was living there alone with his gym equipment, his expensive cars, a Porsche Cayenne and a matte black Challenger, both of which Ryan seemed incapable of parking without taking up one and a half spaces. His friends who came and went at all hours, loud and careless in the way that people are when they’ve never had to consider other people.
The music was the first thing. Not music, exactly. Music was the wrong word. It was bass. Seismic, structural bass at eleven o’clock at night that made the pictures on Ethan’s walls vibrate slightly. Ethan lay in bed the first night it happened and did what he’d been trained to do. He assessed the situation. Is this a crisis? No. Is this a problem I need to address immediately? No. Is this going to stop on its own? He waited. At 12:30 a.m. it stopped. He went to sleep.