He stared at me for a second.
“Everything?”
“Yes.”
“That’s—” he stopped, clearly recalibrating the scale of what I had just given him. “That’s a lot of trust.”
“It is appropriate trust.”
His gaze dropped briefly back to the folder again, though I could see he was no longer reading the schedule itself.
He was thinking about the implications of it.
“You’re sure?” he asked quietly.
“Yes.”
There had never been any uncertainty about that.
* * *
By the time the gate closed behind him, the house already felt different.
Quieter.
Not in the ordinary way a house becomes quiet after a visitor leaves, but in the particular way a space changes once someone has begun to belong inside it and then abruptly isn’t there anymore.
I typically preferred the quiet.
But right now, it just felt as if I’d lost something.
It hurt my chest in a way I’d never felt before.
I remained standing in the entry corridor far longer than necessary, listening to the fading sound of the stupid rideshare vehicle descending the access road toward the main highway below the cliffs.
I’d tried to convince him to let Ben drive him home, but he’d refused, and I hadn’t wanted to push too hard.
After I could no longer hear the car at all, I turned and walked back toward my private study.
When I entered, the three displays on the wall above my desk were still showing the live feeds from Cove’s office and other cameras situated around the home. There were several in the main aquarium wing alone.
It’d made me infinitely more relaxed to be able to look up from my work and see Cove where he belonged. In fact, Ben had even commented on how much better my calls had gone.
Ben had not been exaggerating.
My callshadgone better.
It was difficult to quantify precisely why that had been the case, but the difference was measurable. My attention had not wandered. My irritation tolerance had remained higher than usual. I had not ended a single meeting early.
Each time my gaze lifted from the documents on my desk, Cove had been somewhere within reach of sight.
Sometimes he had been seated in the office I prepared for him, but mostly he’d been out by the tanks.
There was one instance when he’d sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the box jellies’ tank, his back against the tank across from them. He’d sat there for close to twenty minutes, just existing in their presence. The look of serenity on his face had been so captivating that I had abandoned the conversation I was meant to be following entirely and watched him instead. The development associate on the other line benefited from this display, as I dropped close to double the amount of my standard donation.
A knock against the study’s door pulled me out of my thoughts.
“You’re still watching the cameras,” Ben chuckled, not waiting for permission before striding into the room to take a seat in front of my desk. “You know he left already, right?”
