“This is us,” Ethan finally said, glancing at the brownstone to my left.

I made myself face him.

Nothing had changed.

*

We walked up the stairs in silence. Ethan led the way, turning back every few steps, as if to check I was still there, following him. At the very last floor, the fourth, we stopped by the only door that had a number on it. Ethan pulled out a small key chain in the shape of a tiny silver wing with a short string that held two golden keys at the very end of it.

It wasn’t until he closed the door behind us and flicked the switch that I realized how big the apartment was. Unlike our house, it was obvious this place had been professionally tended to. Nothing seemed as though it had been gathered through time; there was absolutely no intimacy to it. Everything had a proper place, from the way the couch seemed to rest at the exact distance the gigantic TV required, to the countless books that seemed sorted by size and color—rather than subject and author—on the wall-to-wall bookcase that took up most of the living room. The room was quite beautiful, yet extremely impersonal. Shades of gray and brown contrasted perfectly with empty items of crystal that decorated almost every surface. It was oppressive, cold, and distant. Everything Ethan was not.

“Is no one home?” I asked as I looked around.

He took off his shoes and left them by the door, which I mimicked.

“My dad’s at his girlfriend’s,” he said, throwing his keys on a large, round, bare wooden table and walking to the kitchen. “Popcorn?”

“Sure,” I said.

He quickly put a bag of popcorn inside the microwave and hit the button. Two and a half minutes later, Ethan poured the contents in a large plastic bowl. The way he handled the wrapper was as though no heat emanated from it—which I have to admit, was, in and on itself, kind of hot.

“Follow me,” he said, and led me down a long hallway.

His bedroom was the last door on the left. Unlike the rest of the apartment, the room was nothing if not warm. It wasn’t messy, but there was no system to any of it. An unmade king-sized bed with no headboard stood under a large window that took up most of the wall, with a nightstand that had a pile of books and an incense packet—but no lamp—next to it. On the opposite wall, a large dresser with some trophies and medals resting on its top made for the last piece of furniture in the room. There was no artwork on the walls, except for a single painting that stood out in both size and ugliness, and I instantly guessed it was either covering a hole behind it or was something Ethan had been forced into hanging.