“I don’t know if that’s better.”
Ben sighed. “It is for everyone else.”
I studied him for a long moment. “You are encouraging this.”
“I am.”
“Despite the risks.”
“Because of the risks, Tobias.” Ben then pushed away from the desk and picked up the lunch bag again. “I’ll take this to the kitchen. Invite him in when you’re ready.”
12
Cove
A few weeks in, I stopped expecting the job to feel less strange.
Not because it stopped being strange—it absolutely did not.
There was nothing normal about being picked up every morning by the personal assistant of a billionaire, driven through two security gates, handed coffee in a house built into a cliffside, and then spending the day caring for sea creatures, some of which I’d have most likely never been able to see if it weren’t for Tobias.
But the human brain was weirdly adaptable.
Eventually, even impossible things became routine if they happened often enough.
By the third week, I knew that Ben preferred music in the mornings but podcasts in the afternoons, unless he’d had a long day, in which case he drove mostly in comfortable silence. I knew the first gate opened slower than the second, and that thecamera tucked into the stone pillar on the right always turned a fraction before Ben lifted his hand in greeting.
The job itself got me too, though in a different way.
I’d thought I’d be overwhelmed, and I was, but not in the drowning sense. More like the world had handed me the key to a life I’d never imagine living.
There was always something to solve. Always something to track, calibrate, question, or adjust. The collection wasn’t static, no matter how perfect it looked from the outside. Water moved and animals changed. Systems responded to pressure, temperature, light, feeding, weather, mood—sometimes even to patterns I couldn’t prove yet but could feel sitting at the edge of observation.
It was hard work—the kind that left me tired in my bones by the time Ben drove me home, salt dried on my skin and my brain still underwater.
I loved it.
I loved it so much that sometimes it scared me.
Because fulfillment was a dangerous thing to discover after spending months trying not to hope for too much. Once you felt what it was like to be used properly, it became hard to imagine going back.
At the aquarium, I had always been trying to make myself smaller without realizing it.
At Tobias’s estate, I was constantly being asked to expand.
Not with words, exactly.
Tobias didn’t give pep talks. I couldn’t even imagine what that would look like. He would probably stand too straight, stare too intensely, and say something like, “Your competence is evident,” which would somehow both reassure and terrify me.
But he trusted my decisions.
That was the thing I kept coming back to.
If I changed a feeding rotation, he asked why, listened to the answer, and then accepted it. If I suggested a lighting adjustment, it happened. If I said a tank needed additional monitoring, the interface in my office was updated before the end of the day. No committee. No waiting for approval from someone who barely understood the system. No polite nods followed by nothing.
Just action.
It made me careful.
