Chapter 2: The Year of Unanswered Calls
For the next year, I called him every week.
I sent messages almost every night.
Ethan never answered a single one.
I left voicemails that began with ordinary updates—weather, the neighbor’s dog, the fact that I had kept his room exactly as he left it—and ended with the same quiet plea that he let me know he was safe. The messages accumulated in a thread that showed only my outgoing words. Blue bubbles without replies. After three months I stopped expecting the typing indicator. After six I continued anyway, because the alternative was to accept that the silence was permanent and that Richard’s experiment in forced adulthood had succeeded in cutting the line completely.
Richard showed no regret.
“If he can’t handle this,” he said, “then he was weaker than I thought.”
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He said it at the dinner table. He said it when I lingered too long by the front window. He said it when the school sent a final transcript request and I had no address to provide. Each repetition carried the same calm certainty that strength was measured by the ability to survive without softness. I stopped arguing. Argument only produced the same sentences in a slightly harder voice. Instead I kept the calls and the messages as a private record that Richard never asked to see. The record proved only that I had not stopped reaching. It could not prove that Ethan had received any of it.
The seasons moved across the house without him. His bedroom door stayed closed. The baseball glove on the shelf collected a thin film of dust I could not bring myself to wipe away. Richard began speaking of the extra room as potential storage. I answered in the shortest possible sentences and kept the door locked from the inside with a key Richard did not know I had duplicated. The gesture was small and possibly meaningless. It was also the only form of resistance I could sustain without open warfare.
