Rise Of The Belittled Billionaire.

Chapter 5

Ethan never sat down.

Not once, the entire night.

He stood at the front of the cremation room with the urn sitting on the table before him and his hands clasped behind his back, and he just stayed there. Still. Upright. The way a soldier stands at attention, except there was no one giving orders and no one watching and no reason to hold himself that straight except that sitting down felt like giving up, and he was not ready to give up the last few hours he had left in the same room as his mother.

The divorce papers were in his jacket pocket.

They had been delivered that morning.

He had folded it back up and put it in his pocket without a word.

He stood there the whole night with that paper against his chest and his mother's body on the other side of a steel door, and he didn't cry and he didn't speak and he didn't move.

When morning finally came and the staff started arriving, they noticed him immediately the man standing in the corner who looked like he had been there for hours and probably had and after a while one of them came over and spoke to him quietly. Told him it was time. Told him they needed to begin.

Ethan nodded once.

He watched them take her in.

He stood there while the furnace ran. He stood there while the building filled with the early morning sounds of other people arriving, other families, other grief happening in other rooms. He stood there through all of it, and when the staff came back and placed the urn in his hands, he held it carefully, the way you hold something that cannot be replaced, and he walked out into the morning light.

He couldn't believe it was over, everything he had lost his mother, everything was over.

However he decided to go get his belongings from the house, knowing fully well it won't stay their anymore, and also Mia would be happy for that, and the divorce.

Not long after he got to the Sutton estate sat behind iron gates on the north side of the city, the kind of property that announced money without having to say a word. Wide front steps. Manicured hedges. A driveway long enough that anyone had time to feel small before you even reached the front door.

Ethan had lived here for four years.

He pulled up in a cab and got out with the urn held in both hands and his single bag over his shoulder, and the first thing he saw  before he reached the steps, before he got anywhere close to the door was his belongings and Probably his mother as well.

His clothes were in garbage bags. Three of them, lined up neatly at the edge of the driveway like they had been waiting for him. His books were in a cardboard box that someone had taped shut badly, one corner already splitting. His shoes and his late mother shoes were loose, just tossed into a pile beside the bags.

He stood there and looked at it all for a long moment.

Then he shook his head slowly.

“Suttons,” he said under his breath, and there was no surprise in his voice. None at all. Just a quiet, tired recognition. 

“Typical Mia”

He had barely finished the thought when the front door opened.

Mia came out first, still in last night's dress, heels swapped for slippers. Behind her came her mother, Karen Sutton, in a silk robe with her hair pinned up and her face carrying the particular expression she reserved for situations she found personally offensive. Behind Karen came Mia's brother, Derek Sutton, toothpick in the corner of his mouth, hands in his pockets, looking at Ethan the way someone look at something that showed up on your doorstep that you didn't order. And last came Jade, close behind Mia's shoulder the way she always was, clipboard in hand, lips pressed thin.

Four of them. Lined up at the top of the steps like a panel.

Karen spoke first. 

“Where exactly have you been all night?”

Ethan said nothing.

“I'm talking to you.” Her voice sharpened. 

“You leave without a word, you don't come home, you don't answer your phone, and now you show up at —”  She looked at her watch with exaggerated disgust. 

“ — this hour, looking like something that crawled in from the street, carrying that — ” Her eyes landed on the urn and her face changed, not to sorrow, not to any kind of recognition, but to revulsion. Pure, unfiltered revulsion. 

“Is that what I think it is?”

“You brought that here?”

At that moment Derek pulled the toothpick from his mouth, he couldn't believe what the bastard just did. 

“Into this house? Are you serious right now?”

“The smell.”  Karen pressed two fingers under her nose and actually stepped back. 

“You can smell it from here. You carried that thing all the way here on public transport? The smell of a cremated body is on you right now, you know that? You reek of it.”