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.
“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.