“I don’t care what your lawyer said.” Low, and controlled. “It’s not happening.”
Whatever she said next made the muscle in his jaw flicker.
He said nothing for a long moment but stood there, absorbing it.
Then, quieter, rougher.
“I put everything into our home. You moved out. You left.”
I knew I was still standing there.
I eased toward the locker area in what I hoped appeared a casual, completely natural movement that in no way suggested I had been absorbing every word of a private conversation. The aquarium’s morning quiet worked against me—that hush before the building filled with visitors, when every small sound carried further than it should. My shoes scraped against the floor. The faint shift of my jacket.
Sounds that, in any other context, wouldn’t exist.
Callan turned.
His eyes found me instantly.
And there it was—except it wasn’t. Not the look I expected, not the flat, practiced dismissal, or the slow-burning irritation he’d spent years perfecting specifically, I sometimes thought, for my benefit.
He looked—in the space between one breath and the next, Callan Ward looked like someone who was hurting.
Then the walls went up.
Fast and practiced—not from weakness, but from long habit, from years of having learned that open water isn’t safe. His expression shuttered. His jaw set. His shoulders squared back into the man I recognized.
And just like that, he became Callan the dick again.
He turned away without a word, pressing the phone to his ear.
“I have to go.” Flat. Final. “We’re done here.”
He hung up before she could respond.
The silence that followed seemed different from ordinary silence—heavier somehow, with the shape of everything that had just been said still hanging in it.
I became very absorbed in my locker. Deeply, profoundly absorbed. My fingers found the zipper of my bag and worked it with the focused concentration of someone defusing a bomb.
I waited for it anyway.
The comment about my arrival time, the measured disappointment, delivered in that low, even voice that somehow made casual criticism feel like a formal verdict.
It didn’t come.
Instead, I just heard him breathing, steady and slow.
Then he walked past
me, close enough that I caught it—rain and salt and something underneath both that I couldn’t place or name, a feeling that made the completely contradictory parts of me want to step away and close the distance at the same time.
He didn’t say a word.
And somehow that was worse than if he’d laid into me. At least then I’d know what to do with him. At least then he’d make sense.
Instead, he’d gone and done the unforgivable.
He’d made himself human.