Prologue
Three years, today.
Days at the surgery. Dinners with Sarah, or Mrs. Hudson. Pints with Greg at the corner pub. Once in a very great while a text message from Mycroft that he would not answer: "How are you, John?"
And cups of tea. So many cups of tea.
John fitted his key into the door of 221B and leaned into the turning of it, and just like every other evening upon retuning home, he thought he should ask Mrs. Hudson for the oil can to to alleviate the tight squeak of the key fighting the lock. It had gotten worse over the years. But as soon as he got upstairs, as soon as he walked through the door of his flat on the second floor, he immediately forgot the oil can, the key, the lock, Mrs. Hudson. Coat cast across the couch, shoes kicked under his chair, John's chair, still situated so comfortably, so cozily, across from his chair, black leather and bent chrome, daily carefully dusted by a meticulous Mrs. Hudson, who nonetheless continued to insist she was the landlady, not the housekeeper. He would make himself tea, in his clean kitchen, uncluttered by body parts or potentially explosive beakers of fluids. Make himself two cups of tea, in fact, one of which would go on the small table by his chair, the other on the small table by the chair across. As he drank his, slowly savoring the warmth, he watched the steam diminish as the other cup went cold.
He hadn't intended to keep the flat-he had left him everything, and everything turned out to be quite a substantial something. A house in the country was quite in the range of his possibilities. But each time he went online to look at the listings, perched stiffly on the edge of his chair at the living room table, across from the always empty chair on the other side: "Charming country cottage, lovely garden, perfect for one person, or a couple," he could never get so far as making the call. "I couldn't leave Mrs. Hudson," he told Sarah, Greg, whoever might ask (though only they ever asked, really). "What would she do in that old house, knocking around all alone?"
"But John," Sarah said one almost-winter evening, the third year drawing to a close as they sat curled up with cups of tea on either end of her couch, "You know she'd find other tenants."
"Well, of course she could," he said. "But none of them are me, and I'm all she has left of him."
Wrapped in his dressing gown, later that same evening, John lay on the couch wet-faced and staring up at the ceiling, half-wishing there was a fire on the hearth, half-wishing it was not almost midnight so he could ask Mrs. Hudson to make him a cuppa, wholly wishing that when he got up out of bed in the morning the clock would have somehow turned back and he would be knocking around in the kitchen, blowing up the microwave, pouring toxins into teacups, using the last of the milk.
"What made you think I could survive this?" he said, to the empty chair, to the skull, to the yellow smiling face on the wall.
But he had.