“W-what?”
“I’m not sure how to accurately explain it. " He tapped his fingers against the armrest of his seat, then looked out the window.
The car began to slow, offering us a reprieve from the conversation.
“We’re at the gate.”
I ventured a glance out of the window as well and found a tall, metal gate slowly creeping open to allow the car through.
“Do you get any trespassers out here?”
Tobias’s lips pinched. “Not too many.”
I tried to ignore the implications of that and continued to look out from the car as we left the gate behind and followed a long, winding drive that curved along the edge of a cliff, as if it had been carved directly into the rock.
My jaw dropped in awe as dark blue water stretched out endlessly beyond the edge of the property, waves crashing against jagged rock far below us in bursts of white spray that caught the afternoon light like shattered glass.
Then I saw the house, made of glass and stone, rising out of the cliffside in layered terraces that followed the natural shape of the coastline, as if the whole structure had been designed around the ocean rather than just built near it.
It was made to complement it.
His neighbors were the wind and sea, with not a single other house in sight.
When the car rolled to a smooth stop near the front entrance, tires settling quietly against the pale stone of the drive, I just sat there for a moment with my hand still wrapped around the bottle of water Tobias had given me earlier, staring out thewindow as though the house might shift into something more ordinary if I looked at it long enough.
It didn’t.
The door beside me opened.
Ben stood there again, silent and efficient, the wind tugging lightly at his jacket as he stepped back to give me space to exit.
I climbed out slowly, and the first thing that hit me was the air.
The breeze caught my hair, pushing back the copper strands from my face, and when I inhaled, I could actually taste the ocean on the back of my tongue.
I hadn’t realized how long it had been since I’d stood somewhere like this.
Somewhere open.
Somewhere uninterrupted.
I turned slowly in a quiet circle, trying to take in the scale of everything at once—the sweep of the water below, the endless horizon beyond it, the sheer drop of the cliffs, and the silence that wasn’t silence at all but wind and waves and solitude.
“You’re very far from everything out here,” I said, not quite meaning it as a question.
“Yes, I am,” Tobias answered simply. “I handpicked the land. Do you like it?”
“It’s incredible,” I murmured.
Tobias stepped out of the car to join me, the movement relaxed and unhurried, as though there were nowhere else he needed to be and nothing else competing for his attention.
Ben closed the door behind us, then moved ahead toward the entrance without comment. When he opened the front doors, he stepped inside only long enough to confirm something I couldn’t see before continuing deeper into the house on his own path, leaving Tobias and me alone in the entry hall as though that were the natural arrangement.
The inside of the home was like something out of a fantasy.
Glass walls stretched high, framing the ocean rather than hiding it, and the sound of the waves still carried faintly through the structure as though the building itself had learned to breathe with the tide. I actually pinched the inside of my arm just to be sure I wasn’t dreaming.
And that was before I even noticed the first aquarium.
