Easier, certainly, to keep everyone at arm’s length and call it independence. Easier to catalog every person who’d ever left than to ask what role I’d played in the leaving.
I didn’t let myself finish the thought.
* * *
The aquarium rose into view ahead of me as I turned off the main road, perched on its rocky peninsula—massive, like it had no business being there and didn’t particularly care.
Its curved glass exterior was usually worth looking at. On clear mornings, the panels caught the lightand held it, iridescent and shifting, the whole building seeming to shimmer. Today, it just sat there beneath the heavy sky, dull and fogged, rain streaming down the glass in chaotic paths that made it look like the ocean was trying to reclaim it from the outside in.
Normally, I loved this place.
That was the part I never said out loud—not to colleagues, not in interviews, not to anyone who might use it against me. But it was true. I loved the hushed reverence of it, the way it operated on its own internal logic, entirely separate from the world outside its walls. The light that filtered through the tanks and fell in rippling blue patterns across the concrete floors, turning them into something that looked like the surface of the sea from underneath. The way visitors moved through the galleries with their faces tilted upward, slack with wonder, as if the air itself were thicker, slower, worth moving through carefully.
It made people gentle. I’d always loved that about it.
It had always felt like a refuge.
These days, I wasn’t so sure.
These days, it felt like just another current I was navigating—head down, moving forward, trying not to get pulled under by anything I couldn’t see coming.
I pulled into the employee lot and cut the engine. For a moment, I sat there, listening to the rain intensify against the roof of the car, pelting the metal in irregular bursts, impatient and relentless, the way problems tend to be when you’ve been putting off dealing with them.
I watched the water trace its way down the windshield, branching and rejoining, finding the path of least resistance.
Must be nice, I thought.
Then I grabbed my bag, opened the door, and stepped out into the storm.
Three
Sloane
Sure enough.
I stepped through the employee entrance, shook the rain from my jacket, and there he stood.
Callan.
He stood by the main filtration control panel, his hand against the wall and his back toward me, on the phone. His dark hair appeared damp, curling where it met his collar. Beneath his t-shirt, his shoulders remained strained, the muscles tense not from posture but from the discussion occurring on the other end of the call.
I recognized the tension; I also recognized the other thing, the less convenient thing.
The frustrating, unreasonable truth being despite everything—despite the sighs and the scowls and the years worth of dismissal—Callan pulled at me in a way I never argued myself out of, not merely magnetism; he lackedboyishness, charm, or aesthetic appeal. He was weathered, intense, the type of individual who seemed to inhabit a room in a manner distinct from everyone else, almost as if gravity somehow were stronger around him, and my stomach, that disloyal bitch, noticed every time.
More than once I’d found reasons to linger near the reef exhibit—salinity checks that didn’t need checking—while he cleaned the tanks. The way he moved in the water was so different from how he moved on land: unhurried, certain. Water droplets tracing slow paths down the lean muscles of his back while he worked with the focused quiet of someone who had made peace with silence long ago.
I’d told myself it was observational.
My profession was marine biology. Observation was my job.
I braced for the impact of his attention: the look, the sigh, the measured comment about punctuality, or responsibility, or whatever failure of mine he’d decided to lead with today.
It never came; he didn’t even glance at me.
He appeared to be somewhere else, staring down at the concrete floor with the focused intensity of a man trying to burn a hole through it, jaw clenching, the hand not holding the phone pressed flat against the wall like he needed something solid to push against.
Then I heard it, low, barely audible beneath the constant murmur of the aquarium.