14. Ethan
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Ethan
There are moments when control is a matter of discipline, and there are moments when it's a matter of distance.
This evening requires both.
I’m in the kitchen when I hear her bedroom door open.
I notice it immediately, the way I’ve become increasingly aware of her movement within the apartment without meaning to be.
An adjustment I didn't plan for.
I set my glass down on the counter and turn slightly, just as she steps into the hallway.
And then I make the mistake of looking properly.
Addy pauses at the edge of the living space, one hand still lightly touching the wall behind her as though she hasn’t fully committed to stepping into the room yet.
She’s dressed differently than I’ve seen her so far.
Not the soft practicality of her daytime clothes, or the oversized cardigans and quiet comfort she moves through the apartment in when she’s with Oliver.
This is something else.
A dress, simple in structure but fitted in a way that doesn’t leave much to interpretation.
Dark enough to catch the low light, the fabric shifting slightly as she moves.
Her hair’s down, falling in loose waves instead of the distracted knot she usually forces it into.
There’s makeup, subtle but intentional. Enough to draw attention to her eyes. Her mouth.
She looks…
I stop the thought before it completes, because finishing that sentence leads nowhere useful.
She looks up then and finds me watching her.
There’s a brief, almost imperceptible hesitation in her expression. “Hi.”
“Good evening,” I reply, because I’m not about to contribute to the situation by abandoning structure entirely.
Her mouth twitches, suppressing a smile or a comment. With her, those are usually interchangeable.
“I’m heading out,” she says, gesturing slightly toward the door. “Drinks with Sophie. Human interaction, apparently. Remember?”
“I remember.”
Of course I do.
She mentioned it earlier. More than once, actually, in that half-casual, half-checking tone people use when they’re not entirely sure whether their plans require approval.
They don’t. I told her that. That doesn’t mean I’m indifferent to them.
“You look…” I start.
Then I stop, because there are several words available to me, and not one of them is appropriate.
Addy waits, her expression far too knowing, as if she’s willing to let the silence stretch until I either commit or retreat.
I choose retreat.
“Different,” I finish.
Her eyebrow lifts. “Different?”
“Yes.”
She studies me, and I can see the exact moment she decides to let it go instead of pushing.
“Thank you,” she says lightly.
Oliver appears behind her then, already in pajamas, holding one of his toy planes as part of the conversation.
“You’re going out?” he asks.
“Yes,” Addy says, turning toward him immediately. Her whole expression softens in a way I’ve started noticing far too often. “Just for a little while.”
“Why?”
“To see a friend.”
Oliver considers this carefully. “Can I come?”
She smiles. “Not this time.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s a grown-up thing.”
He thinks about that, gripping the toy plane in both hands. “Will there be planes?”
Addy snorts softly. “Tragically, no.”
“Then I don’t want to come anyway.”
She smirks, “That feels like a strong stance.”
He nods once, satisfied, then wanders off again.
Addy watches him go, a gentleness settling in her expression before she looks back at me. “I shouldn’t be late. But if I'm—”
“I’ll be here,” I cut in. “There’s no issue.”
She nods.
There’s one of those unnecessary, loaded pauses that didn’t exist before that night in the kitchen and now seems to exist everywhere.
Her hand shifts against her side, as if she’s about to say more.
Then she doesn’t.
“Okay,” she says.
I nod once. “Have a good evening.”
“You too.”
She turns toward the door.
Captain immediately abandons his position on the rug to follow her, tail already in motion.
“Oh no, you don’t,” she tells him, crouching slightly to intercept. “You're not invited. This is a no dogs, no bedlam, no stealing strangers’ belongings kind of event.”
He sits, looks at her, and refuses to move.
I watch this play out before stepping in. “Captain.” He glances at me, then back at her, clearly weighing his options. “Don’t make me repeat myself.”
He sighs, which is an impressive display of disappointment from a dog, and returns to the rug.
Addy laughs softly. “He has no respect for authority.”
“He has selective loyalty.”
“Same thing.”
She straightens, gives me one last look, and then opens the door. Cold air slips into the apartment as she steps out.
Then she’s gone.
And the space she leaves behind is immediately, noticeably different.
Oliver is still moving somewhere down the hall. Captain resettles with a low huff. The city hum continues beyond the glass.
But there’s an absence now.
One I shouldn't be aware of.
Oliver is asleep within twenty minutes.
That part's easier than it used to be, not because I’ve improved at it, but because he’s settling, becoming steadier again.
That’s her doing.
Another fact I'm not inclined to examine too closely.
I check on him once more before I leave the room, adjusting the blanket slightly, smoothing a hand over his hair.
He doesn’t wake.
Good.
The apartment is dim when I return to the main living space. The city fully dark now, reflections sharper against the glass.
I could stay here. Work through emails, review projections, and go over the demo architecture again.
Instead, I turn toward my home office. The door closes quietly behind me, and I cross to the built-in shelving along the far wall and pause.
I don’t move.
Then I reach for the lower cabinet and open it.
Inside, arranged with precision, is the part of my life that didn’t survive intact.
Flight logs, old system schematics, a model aircraft, slightly worn at the edges, the paint dulled where it’s been handled too often, photographs, and beneath them, a stack of folders I haven’t touched in months.
Megan’s handwriting is still on some of them.
That alone is enough to make most people close the cabinet again.
I don’t.
I reach in and take out the top folder. I move to the desk and set it down, opening it with the same controlled care I use for everything else.
Inside are reports, initial findings from the crash investigation, technical breakdowns, system logs, annotations in my own handwriting, sharper in places, erratic in others.
I remember how I was back then.
Obsessive.
But the official conclusion had just come far too quickly.
Pilot error.
A sequence of incorrect responses under system stress, missed indicators, and delayed correction.
I’d read it once, then again, then I’d taken it apart piece by piece because it didn’t align with anything I knew about her.
Megan didn’t miss indicators, didn’t panic under pressure, and didn’t make basic mistakes. She flew through conditions most pilots would’ve refused outright and came back with a quiet shrug and a list of things she’d do differently next time.
And yet, according to the report, she’d failed in ways that didn’t make sense.
At first, they told me it was grief, that I was looking for something to blame because accepting randomness was harder.
They weren’t wrong about the last part, but they were wrong about the rest.
I flip through the pages, scanning the data I already know by memory. Altitude fluctuations, control inputs, stabilization system responses.
There.
That’s where it always catches.
A sequence of corrections that doesn’t quite align with the expected behavior. Easy to overlook if you trust the summary more than the raw data.
I never did.
I pull another file from the stack and open it beside the first. Original system architecture, the early framework, the version that existed before scale refined it, before layers of safety and redundancy were added.
Back when it was just…
I stop.
Because that thought leads directly to… Bee.
He helped design the foundation of this system with Megan and me. The three of us built the earliest iteration together.
Which means if there was a flaw…
I lean back slightly, exhaling once.
No.
This is exactly where the obsession started before.
Pattern hunting, connecting things that may or may not connect, losing time to the possibility that something hidden could be uncovered if I just looked long enough.
It nearly cost me everything that mattered after she died.
Oliver, myself, whatever remained of a life outside this room.
I shut the folder halfway, then open it again almost immediately, because the thought has never actually left. It’s only been contained. Disciplined. Set aside in favor of everything more immediate, more necessary.
But now…
Now there are new variables.
The demo, architecture revisions that don’t sit quite right, the same instinct I had then, quiet but persistent, telling me something isn’t as clean as it appears.
I reach for a pen, pull a blank sheet toward me, and list the discrepancies without conclusions or theories.
Just facts.
The system response lag, the feedback loop inconsistency, the minor deviation in stabilization timing that was written off as environmental interference.
I write them down in clean lines.
This is how it starts again, but I won’t allow it to become an obsession this time. I’ll analyze in a controlled and intentional manner, and if there's more here, I’ll find it. Properly this time.
Without losing everything else in the process.