This Is Home

Ch1: This Is Home

"Oh, you're going to be fine, little toad. I promise. You're going to go and find a family who will give you everything - everything we couldn't."

- Ethan Hardy, November 2015.

_____

Three years later.

An empty-calendar day awaits Ethan. It seems crucial to begin it, at the start of dawn, with some form of productivity. A black coffee materialises onto the stainless kitchen counter and he pulls open the crooked blinds. The interior of his flat is sunlit, marinated with the scent of caffeine, and echoey with silence.

One good morning text waits for him. Two incipient letters wormed through the postbox onto the coir doormat. Ethan pulls out the phone, presses the passcode into it, and replies to the text gratefully. A mental pact is made to call her later. A pleasant distraction from the many hours of nothing he'll have to endure - Ethan is aware he is rather different from most people after having this thought, as most relish the chance to lavish in laziness. It's like there's a clock in his brain. He can't waste an hour.

If an empty flat isn't solitary enough, one at remotely four in the morning is positively eliciting the feeling that he's the last man on earth. He turns on the radio, as to not feel the gaping gap of being alone so intensely, and takes out his overused iron. And so the dull beginning to his day truly commences.

The iron presses creases out of dress shirts, working them out meticulously. He folds the garments cautiously and rests them on the sofa arm. On the last pair of trousers, it topples the pile, and they fall like a tired toddler in a mess on the sofa. Ethan lets himself sigh.

He pulls his weary self from the empty living room, longing to fall right back into his rumpled bed sheets. In the doorway of his room, dissimulated by lack of light, his legs bump labelled cardboard boxes. Fastened with brown sellotape, he recognises his own neat scrawl and expels a breath. That's a chunk of his life, packed into a box.

Much persuasion had been used on him in order for him to even entertain the notion of moving out. They say it'll help ease feelings of grief. Ethan thinks they're wrong, but he isn't fond of arguments when the persuaders (Charlie, mainly, and Alicia with unsubtle digs from Connie) were simply doing their best.

They just don't understand. The flat size might be astronomically immense, empty and glaring. The walls might be painted with a thin layer of cream to hide the glaring pink. Rent might be pricey and he may be paying for a bedroom that isn't used anymore. Yet moving is wrong. He's not ready to say goodbye to this place just yet.

_____

A familiar ringing of his phone is a decent distraction. Ethan lets it go off for a ring and a half, in a bid to hide desperation which would surely show if he were to answer it straight away, afore pressing it between his ear and shoulder.

"Can't sleep?"

"Hello, Alicia," he says, and finds himself immediately hoisted from solitude. "No. Insomniac hours, I'm afraid this is my prime. What's your excuse?"

"Well, actually. There was a fascinating case on cystic fibrosis that was forwarded onto me by Robyn, and I had to research it."

Ethan finds solace in being able to laugh. "Right. Now give me the real reason - I'll have you know that I'm not that easy to fool." Clever as she might be, Alicia is marginally the sort to deprive herself of beloved sleep for unnecessary research.