Chapter 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 the camera 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.
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.
Not directly.
Those pieces had to be noticed.
Or earned.
Or maybe they were given so carefully I didn’t always realize what they were until later.
The first time I asked him a question that wasn’t about the tanks, I almost backed out halfway through.
We were watching the ghost shark move through dim water like a half-remembered dream. Her body cut through the blue-black with that strange, delicate grace she had, all cartilage and shadow and ancient softness.
Tobias stood beside me with his hands clasped behind his back.
“Ben said you bought the estate because of the ocean,” I said.
And for one awful second when Tobias didn’t respond, I thought I’d crossed a line.
But then he said, “Yes, I didn’t like living inland. The air felt wrong.”
I looked at him.
His eyes were on the tank, the ghost shark reflected faintly in his glasses.
That was such a strange answer. Such a Tobias answer.
And yet, somehow I understood it perfectly.
“Too still?” I asked.
His gaze shifted to me then. “Yes.”
After that, it became easier.
Not easy, but easier.
Sometimes I asked small things. What made him choose a certain species. How old he’d been when he set up his first tank. Whether he actually liked coffee or just drank it because it was efficient.
He answered most of them.
Sometimes with a sentence.
Sometimes with one word.
Sometimes with a look that made me realize I’d asked the wrong version of the question, and if I tried again from a different angle, he might give me more.
I was learning him the way I learned difficult systems—slowly and carefully, without assuming the first reading told the whole truth.
And he was learning me too.
He knew I hated phone calls, and that sometimes I forget to drink water when I was too deep into observation.
He knew I’d talk myself out of suggesting a change if I thought it might create extra work for someone else, so he’d started asking, very directly, “What would you do if resources were not a concern?”
Which was such an unfair question, because resources were always a concern.
Except, apparently, here.