He's heard it all before.
In fact, he's heard it several times a day every day for the past year. Ever since he decided to join the police.
Now he hears it again. His father has been throwing the same old arguments at him - that he shouldn't put his life on the line for other people, that other people aren't worth caring about - from the moment he came into the kitchen for his dinner that his mum has set in front of him like every evening, accompanied with a glance that begs him to let it go, to let the agitated voice of his father wash over him without rising to the bait.
He couldn't ever bring himself to do so.
Alec kept trying to defend his decision to become a police officer. To see his mother suffer under his father's rage only strengthened his conviction that other people are worth protecting, that some people fail at protecting themselves.
Today he ignores his father.
They've gone through the motions of a discussion that isn't a real discussion countless times and by now it's clear that there is no point in trying to persuade him of the soundness of his career choice. He finds that he doesn't care about his father's opinion anymore. No, of course he doesn't know whether the job is going to be what he imagines it to be, whether he will be able to help people.
He won't ever find out if he doesn't try it first.
They can't even agree to disagree, so he stays silent, digs into his mashed potatoes that are still too hot to eat and hides behind the steam rising from them so he doesn't see the disdain in his father's eyes and the desperate wish for anything that's not a fight in his mother's.
It prompts his father to fling the one argument into Alec's face that always makes him flinch.
"You can't move away for two years! How do you think your mother will cope? Don't you care more about her than about strangers?"
"Alec," his mum tries to break through her husband's rant. The pleading tone she uses with his father has etched itself into her son's mind like the gravel that has been stuck under the kitchen door for years so that it has carved part of a circle into the tiles. He can't remember a time when hearing his first name didn't remind him of this particular inflection.
Alec can't remember a time when he didn't hate his name that's also his father's either.
Soon, he'll get away from their constant fighting. It's harder to bear the bickering now than it ever was when the days in his parent's house still stretched all the way to the horizon in front of him.
His chair scrapes over the floor when he has enough and leaps to his feet. The dissonant screeching of the kitchen door he pushes out of his way in his anger and impatience to get outside seems like an appropriate soundtrack to the anguish spending an evening with both of his parents causes him.
He goes to the one place affording him some kind of peace because his father's grating voice doesn't reach him there since he'd never leave his dinner to follow his son: the sun-warmed steps leading to the front door. The roses growing in a dirt patch to the left saturate the evening air with their soft scent. The small garden is framed by beige walls on two sides and the house at the back. To sit here is like hiding in a cocoon he spins himself into when the world seems to be bleeding out at the edges, leaving him without a moral compass telling him what's right and what's wrong.
The door lock clicks behind him, and he flinches before he becomes aware of the cautious movements of his mum. She walks down the steps and sits next to him. The flowing fabric of her long grey wool skirt brushes his leg and the gentle breeze this causes wraps him into a blanket of the sweet scent of the pink flowers glowing in the warm evening light.
When Alec was a child, his mum's hugs used to make everything all right. A sudden longing to hide in her arms comes over him, but he quashes the thought. He hasn't gotten a hug in years and he might only be hanging onto a memory that reality wouldn't live up to. The self-sufficient adult he's become doesn't need hugs, he assures himself.
"As much as I'd like for you to stay here, I understand that you need to leave for a while to follow your dream," his mum says and picks a few withered, yellow leaves from the flowering bush.
"I'm sorry."
At the sadness in her son's brown eyes that resembles what she sees in the mirror every night, she cards her fingers through his hair for the first time in years. Not a single auburn strand ever sticks out. Despite the pain of seeing Alec setting such tight limits for himself to live within, she didn't allow herself to upset the strict order he creates with his shirts and ties and severe hairstyle. He's distancing himself from his dad who looks like the disheveled manual worker that he is, and although she wishes Alec wouldn't have any reason to do that, she understands. Her husband is so used to fending for himself that he doesn't know what to do with a son who has a soft spot for anyone in need of help.
To her surprise, Alec relaxes under her touch and leans into her. At this, she pulls him into a tight embrace, and since he doesn't resist, she holds him as she used to whenever he was upset when he was little. She cradles his head in the crook of her neck, and instead of the smooth cheek of a child, she feels a hint of evening stubble on her shoulder.
Alec closes his eyes and breathes in his mum's lavender perfume.
"Don't be sorry," she tells him while he relishes the feeling of her arms around him. "Go follow your dream. You can't foresee what's going to happen. God will put you in the right place, even if you don't know it at the time."
While he doesn't share her unwavering belief, Alec hopes she's right.
It's weird to be hugged after so many years: there's the relief at being comforted, the bad conscience because he's the one who gets to leave and should be consoling his mum and not the other way around, and the ache in his back from stooping down to her - when he was twelve, he was still shorter than she is.
It's the first hug since then, and he can feel himself starting to miss it because he won't get another one for several months.
He doesn't know yet that it will be the last hug his mum will ever give him.
Twenty-five years later, he recognises the moment when he's in the right place at the right time, and it's in a town he loathes, yet during this night, he's where he needs and wants to be: in his hotel room, being there for his colleague and friend on the day he arrested her husband because he turned out to be the murderer they were looking for.
It's also the day he questions his decision to become a detective and stops being one.
Another year later, when the murderer walks free and Ellie helps him to close the case on Sandbrook on the same day, he's still not sure whether becoming a police officer was a good idea. It destroyed his life and put the shards back together into a new mosaic, the complete design of which he can't quite fathom yet.
Through his work, he met Tess, whose strength and obsession with her career drew him towards her because he'd never known a woman who fought for her own success with such fervour before. His belief that she didn't need him was one of the reasons for the downfall of their marriage, but she gave him Daisy, and he can't imagine a life without his daughter, much less after having suffered through it for several weeks.
There was his wife's betrayal and the subsequent collapse of the Sandbrook case, but when he asked Ellie for her help, he gained her friendship and someone he's able to trust.
All those good things and bad things started the day he left his parents' house to follow his dream and join the police. While he almost didn't make it through the worst phase alive, he wouldn't want to have missed any of the happy times either.
Alec tightens the knot on his tie. The man reflected in the car window isn't the same person anymore that he was twenty-six years ago, yet that boy who craves being close to the people he loves is still part of him. He's even starting to resemble him a bit more than he did the past several months, now that he's closed all the buttons on his shirt and pushed his hair out of his eyes.
However, he now carries a wealth of experiences with him that the lanky boy in that front garden never even thought possible. Some of them hurt, some of them filled him with the greatest joy he's ever felt.
Whatever the mosaic of his life will look like once it's complete, it'll be all right. He'll do whatever he can to make it something good.
With that thought, he gets into the taxi and onto his way towards the next piece of the puzzle.