I already knew it the way you know a headache is coming—that low, creeping certainty settling in behind your eyes before the pain arrives.
He’d be standing there when I walked in.
Arms crossed. Jaw tight. That permanent scowl carved so deep into his face that it looked like it had been putthere on purpose—like some bitter sculptor had spent decades perfecting it.
The muscle beneath his salt-and-pepper stubble twitched, just once, the way it always did when he was working very hard at not saying anything.
He wouldn’t say good morning.
He’d just look at the clock—those cold blue eyes cutting deliberately to the wall—then back to me. Note the rain-damp hair, the flushed cheeks, the general impression of someone who had lost a small war with her own morning, and then he’d sigh. Not a sharp sound, not impatient or theatrical, just a long, slow exhale through his nose, the kind that seemed to travel all the way up from somewhere deep in his chest, like I was a burden he’d been carrying for years and had only just remembered the weight of.
As if my existence alone was an inconvenience he’d been quietly enduring—a persistent leak he’d learned to put a bucket under but never quite gotten around to fixing.
The man was, without question, the single most insufferable person I had ever encountered in a professional setting, and for reasons that continued to elude me entirely, he had made me his personal project.
Not that I’d given him any ammunition.
I did my job the way some people practice religion—with devotion, with precision, with an almost embarrassing attention to detail: water quality metrics logged in parts per million, feeding schedules memorized not as data but as personality—because every ray had one, every shark had one, and you had to know the difference between an animal that was off its food and one that was simply having a bad Tuesday. My degrees hung in my cubicle where I could see them:marine biology from Berkeley, a specialized certification in captive ecosystem management, the gold embossing catching the light like sun filtered through shallow water. Ten years I’d spent with my hands submerged in research tanks, published papers on cephalopod stress responses that researchers across three continents cited by name.
But Callan never missed an opportunity to remind me that none of it mattered here. A single dismissive snort, barely audible over the constant murmur of the filtration systems, could undo a decade of credentials in under a second.
Never mind that I was the marine biologist on staff. Never mind that I made more than he did. Never mind that half the protocols he followed without question existed because of research that people like me had spent years producing.
Technically, he was my supervisor—the aquarium’s senior aquarist, twenty years in, his hands permanently weathered from decades submerged in saltwater. Fingernails perpetually rimmed with black algae that no amount of scrubbing ever fully removed. Skin tanned and leathery, like driftwood left too long on a beach. He wore his years here like armor and, somewhere along the way, had appointed himself the sovereign of saltwater and suffering, ruling his underwater kingdom with the quiet tyranny of a man who had never once been told he was wrong.
And the maddening thing, the thing I would never have admitted out loud, was that sometimes I almost understood him.
Sometimes, when he showed me how to coax a reluctant octopus from its hiding place, his hands moving with a gentleness that seemed to belong to an entirely different person, I could almost see it. Why he believed what hebelieved. Why experience, to him, wasn’t just equal to education—it was superior to it in every way that counted.
But then he’d look at me.
Really look at me. And I’d see it, plain as ever—the verdict he’d reached long before I’d ever walked through those doors and apparently had no intention of revisiting. In his mind, I was still the outsider. Still the problem. Still the woman with the impressive degrees and no real instinct, who required his constant correction and probably always would.
Perhaps being in his forties had done it to him. Ground him down somewhere along the way until all that was left was this—the scowl, the silence, the careful hoarding of his tanks and his routines and his small, controlled world.
Or he’d always been like this. Bitter, the way old wood gets darker, slow and deep, until it’s just part of the grain, or possibly, stripped of all explanations, it was much simpler.
He just didn’t like me.
I tightened my grip on the steering wheel, the irritation in my chest doing what it always did—settling in low and familiar.
I was so tired of it.
Of the tension, of the constant criticism. Of the way he looked at me like I was temporary.
Wasn’t that the oldest story I knew?
I’d been temporary my whole life. Convenient. Easy to set aside. My father had managed it before I’d even drawn my first breath. My mother had found a replacement family somewhere along the way—children who apparently deserved a version of her I never got. Every relationship since had followed the same quiet pattern: people who wanted pieces of me, specific and manageable pieces, butnever the inconvenience of the whole. Even my professors—the ones who’d praised my research in print, who’d cited my work in their own papers—couldn’t quite place my face at department functions.
Six years at Bay City, and still the highest approval I’d managed to extract from Callan was the occasional absence of disapproval.
God. I loosened my grip on the wheel slightly, almost embarrassed by my own train of thought.
Self-pity doesn’t suit you, Sloane.
But underneath the irritation, quieter and harder to look at directly, was something I didn’t like to examine too closely: the uncomfortable suspicion that I had gotten very good at being overlooked. That I had, somewhere along the way, learned to arrange my life so that being truly seen remained safely out of reach.
Because what if being seen was worse than being forgotten?