Echoes in the Tide (Streams of Water #2)

Prologue

Logan’s soul had stayed behind on that crumpled, sunburnt beach in Australia, tethered to the one man he ever truly loved. Logan had left, but it didn’t. It clung to Adrian like seaweed in a tide pool, refusing to follow Logan’s body across continents, refusing to let him leave Adrian entirely.

So, Logan had moved on. Or at least he told himself he had.

He slipped into beds warmed by others, yet the chill within his soul remained unshaken.

He brushed past lives that seemed flawless on paper, but beneath the surface, he’s been drowning ever since.

Drowning in silence, drowning in absence, drowning in a grief he couldn’t name, even though Adrian’s name had been written in bold on every scattered piece of his broken, suffocating soul.

Logan had tried to reach for the surface, gasping for air, clawing through, but nothing came. He told himself he was fine because he was alive, he was breathing, wasn’t he? He had a career. He got married. He was the head of an entire industry. On paper, he was alive.

Yet, inside, he was drowning, suffocating, each breath splintered, hollow, wrong. It hadn’t made sense. Nothing had. Not then. Not now.

There was that penumbral hovering over his life; he lingered half in the world, half in the ashen corridors of memory, where fragments glimmered like broken halos.

In his mind they turned, slow and inexorable, a ring of heaven burning above him, while all around, the infernal flames rose to claim what little of him remained.

Logan’s wife had begged for a child, and at night he had found himself seeking the fleeting warmth of Zack’s arms, searching for something, anything, to quiet the ache that hollowed out his chest.

But he hadn’t really been there.

He hadn’t really been anywhere.

Not with her. Not with Zack.

His heart had still been lost on that Australian shore, wandering the drift, caught in the undertow, standing guard over a long-lost love that had never been meant to be abandoned.

And no matter how far he ran, or how many years unspooled behind him, he couldn’t shake it.

Logan had asked himself, over and over: How could he have loved someone so completely, so deeply, in just a handful of months?

How had Adrian, with his crooked smile and whisky-eyes, anchored him so profoundly that he hadn’t been able to move on, even years and lifetimes later?

Why Adrian? Why not Zack? Why not anyone else?

What had made him different, special, irreplaceable?

What had it been in Adrian’s soul that had called to his like a lighthouse in a storm?

Or had it been his soul that had called to Adrian, summoned him from the bottom of the ocean to save him, to breathe life back into him when he’d forgotten how?

Maybe it had been the bond forged in the presence of something greater than both of them—the waves, the salt, the rhythm of the sea.

Maybe nature herself had given him a second chance, whispering under the crashing tide, promising him something eternal.

Or maybe it had been simpler than that. Maybe it had just been that Adrian was Adrian.

And Logan had never been meant to leave.

Because in every breath Logan had taken, in every dream he had woken from gasping, in every moment he had felt the emptiness press against his ribs, the truth had remained: Adrian hadn’t just been someone Logan had loved.

He had been the ocean itself. And no matter where Logan had gone, no matter how far, he had never been able to escape the pull of the tide, and the streams of water were coming to claim him back home.