More careful than I’d ever been, maybe, because being trusted that completely meant every decision had weight. Tobias had given me his entire collection like it was obvious I should have it, and I didn’t want to make him regret that.
I didn’t want to fail the animals either.
But if I was honest, in the private little space in my head where nobody else could hear—I also really didn’t want to fail him.
The first week, I was hyperaware of him every time he entered a room. His presence was difficult to ignore under the best circumstances, and those circumstances were rarely best. He had a way of looking at people like he was deciding whether they were worth keeping in the world. Or maybe that was dramatic. Maybe that was just his face.
Either way, he was intimidating.
Still was, technically, but now there were other things layered over it.
There was Tobias in the kitchen, sleeves rolled up, picking out mushrooms one by one from a meal because he knew I didn’t like them. Tobias standing silently beside me in the predator corridor for fifteen minutes because I’d started explaining moray jaw mechanics and then lost track of time. Tobias leaving books on my shelves without saying anything, always exactly the sort of books I would have wanted but wouldn’t have thought to ask for.
He was still strange.
Still stiff and still capable of saying things that made me pause and wonder if he’d meant them the way they sounded, but I was starting to understand him a little better.
Ben helped with that.
Every morning and evening, there was Ben, effortlessly pleasant and impossible not to like. He filled the space between my apartment and Tobias’s estate with conversation until the drive stopped feeling like transportation and started feeling like its own little thing.
He’d told me all sorts of things, like that Tobias hated charity galas but attended the ones that mattered. That Tobias didn’t like celebrating his birthday but always remembered Ben’s. And that Tobias could cook well when he bothered, which apparently happened once every solar eclipse and, for some reason, for me.
He’d said that Tobias had bought the estate land because he wanted to be close to the water but not close to people.
The more Ben told me, the more comfortable I felt with Tobias himself. Not because the stories made him softer exactly, but because they gave context to things I might’ve otherwise misunderstood.
I learned that sometimes he was simply trying very hard to exist in a world that expected people to communicate sideways, through tone and implication and social scripts I wasn’t always great at either.
I also learned that he’d become estranged from his family the moment his career took off. Ben had said it was because they’d always used his intelligence to further their places in society. That even though he’d never felt comfortable around people, they’d parade him around galas and parties and force him to participate.
That was another thing, actually. He was from old money.
Which somehow made everything about him make more sense and less sense at the same time.
I’d known he was rich, obviously. Everyone knew Tobias Kelly was rich. The house alone made that impossible to forget, even if I somehow ignored the cars, the private security, and the fact that Ben could casually say things like “I’ll have that brought in by afternoon”about equipment that would’ve taken the public aquarium weeks of forms and approvals.
I’d known he’d done something with an app. Created one, or sold one, or something.
But old money was different.
Old money explained the manners.
The stiffness.
The way Tobias could stand in a room full of people and look like he belonged above all of them while also seeming like he wanted to be anywhere else. It explained the formality that clung to him even when he was in his own kitchen making eggs with his sleeves rolled up. It explained the sharp polish around him, the controlled speech, the sense that he’d been trained to exist under observation and had hated every second of it.
I didn’t know what to do with that knowledge.
It made me feel closer to him in a way I wasn’t sure I had any right to.
Because Tobias didn’t tell me those things himself. Ben did. And Ben never made it feel like gossip, exactly, but sometimes I still wondered whether I was collecting pieces of Tobias from someone else’s hands instead of waiting for him to offer them.
Then again, Tobias wasn’t the offering type.
Not with information, at least.
And not with himself.
