Heidi Petrelli folded the last of the laundry. As she placed Simon's shirts in his drawer, though, she encountered an unexpected hardness. Feeling cautiously beneath the layers, she pulled out a picture frame with a photograph taken during Nathan's campaign for Congress.
The stereotypical, happy political family photo. Though, in reality, there was nothing stereotypical and very little happy about them.
She could understand why Simon would want to keep it; if nothing else it was a reminder of a time when they were all together. A time before Peter's death. A time before depression had led Nathan to drinking and to driving the rest of his family away. Even before her legs had been healed, their family dynamic had been better, perhaps even happier. If nothing else it was what the boys were used to, what they'd grown up with.
Her finger lingered over Nathan's face, and she wondered, not for the first time, if there was anything that she could do.
Heidi wondered if this was some sort of cosmic payback for her legs getting fixed. Was this the ultimate price that they had to pay? Linderman was dead, and Nathan's burns had healed despite the doctor's skepticism in the hospital – another 'miracle'. But those were just the outer, visible wounds. The depression and the drinking were the two things that had ultimately driven her away, she wasn't sure anyone could help or heal those except Nathan himself.
She wondered if she should try to reach out to him again. If he would even take her calls. She missed him.
They hadn't had the perfect marriage by far, and she knew circumstances – especially after her accident and with his campaign – had been tough on both of them. But no matter their hardships – and maybe because of them – she did love him.
Nathan Petrelli closed the door to his brother's old apartment, the apartment that he now resided in for the most part – when he chose to come home at all.
The frame and picture that he and his mother had broken lay discarded on the nearby dresser. Nathan moved over to pick up the frame and stick it in the drawer with all the other photographs that Peter had kept, but stopped when he spotted the shot of the family.
He traded the frames and moved over to the sofa, wishing he had brought a bottle back from the bar with him. His finger traced over the faces of the boys and came to rest on Heidi. Neither silly nor naive enough to ask how things had gone so horribly wrong between them, Nathan held himself predominantly at fault, as he did with most things.
The last year had been hard, for all of them, but he hadn't been thinking about how it would affect anyone else; he was only concerned with the way things were going for him. The stresses of the campaign, the accident, Linderman and his ploys, discovering he could fly and all of the drama around Peter was all turned around in his mind to show how hard it was for him. In his callous self-absorption, he hadn't even stopped to think for a minute about how hard everything must have been for Heidi… for the boys.
Until it was too late. Heidi's departure for Washington with the boys served as his wake-up call.
He'd thought he might stop the drinking then, that losing Heidi and the boys might be the nudge that he would need to get his life back in order, but it only made his self-destructive tendencies that much more intense – made him push everyone away that much harder.
His mother was right about one thing; it probably was better that his father and his brother weren't around to see him like this. It was better that most of his family wasn't here to see him like this. Heidi had been right to take the boys away from him, to take them away from the life that he was living.
He clutched the picture tightly to his chest. He would fix things. He would get over this. And when he did, he would get them back, bring them back to him and show Heidi that things could go back to how they'd been.
Someday… someday soon he would call her.