It was amazing.
And I was happy.
Possibly happier than I’d ever been in my entire life.
Every morning, Ben picked me up. Every evening, I left tired and salt-sticky and fulfilled because finally, I felt like I was doing work that mattered.
That finally, the people around me saw my strengths, not just my weaknesses.
* * *
The past week of work at Tobias’s had passed like a dream. I spent my days in a private aquarium full of rare, venomous, and ridiculously high-maintenance marine animals. I had an office nicer than any apartment I’d ever lived in. My boss occasionally made me breakfast with his own hands and then acted like that was no more significant than refilling printer paper. His personal assistant drove me to and from work every day because of the continuing “security concerns”that, in hindsight, I still didn’t fully understand.
Today, I’d been in the aquarium wing for the last few hours, deep enough that the outside world had become theoretical. That happened a lot in Tobias’s house. There were windows everywhere in the rest of the place, but none at all in there. Time moved differently there.
I typically tried to take care of the other tanks that were around the house first so that I could lose myself completely in the wing for the second part of the day.
I had been recalibrating the feeding schedule for the cuttlefish after noticing she was more responsive in the late afternoon than she had been in the mornings. That had led to reviewing the enrichment log, which had led to adjusting the observation notes, which had somehow led to me sitting cross-legged on the floor while I watched her change colors every time I shifted my hand.
By the time I finally checked the time, it was later than I’d meant for it to be.
“Shit,” I whispered, then winced toward the cuttlefish tank like she might be offended by that language.
She pulsed orange and cream.
Probably judgment.
I apologized to her, wished her a good rest of the evening, then gathered my tablet, stood, checked that the feeding toolswere cleaned and logged, and headed out toward my office to put things away before finding Ben.
The hallway outside the aquarium wing felt different.
At first, I couldn’t figure out why, but then I heard it.
Rain.
Not soft rain. Not the gentle kind that made the world smell clean and made people say things likewe needed this.
This was heavy, violent rain, the kind that struck glass hard enough to sound almost like thrown gravel. Wind dragged against the side of the house in long, low bursts, and somewhere beyond the walls, thunder rolled so deeply through the cliffs that I felt it in my ribs before I heard it properly.
The nearest window faced the ocean, and when I stepped closer, the world beyond it looked completely different than it had that morning. The water was no longer blue or silver but dark iron, broken open by whitecaps and the hard slash of rain. Clouds had swallowed the horizon. The cliffside below the house disappeared in bursts of mist and spray.
I pressed my lips together and looked down at my phone. There were weather alerts I had missed, as well as two messages from Ben.
Storm’s getting worse. No rush finishing up.
Come find us in the kitchen when you’re done.
I set my tablet in my office, grabbed my bag, then left my office in pursuit of the kitchen.
I found them in the kitchen where Ben stood near the island with his phone in hand, blond hair a little mussed like he’d been running his fingers through it. Tobias stood opposite him, sleeves rolled up again, one hand resting against the counter while he looked at something on Ben’s screen.
They both looked up when I came in.
“There you are,” Ben said.
“Sorry, I didn’t realize how bad it got.”
“You were in the wing,” Tobias replied, as if that explained everything.
