Chapter 3
Three
Sloane
Sure enough.
I stepped through the employee entrance, shook the rain from my jacket, and there he stood.
Callan.
He stood by the main filtration control panel, his hand against the wall and his back toward me, on the phone.
His dark hair appeared damp, curling where it met his collar.
Beneath his t-shirt, his shoulders remained strained, the muscles tense not from posture but from the discussion occurring on the other end of the call.
I recognized the tension; I also recognized the other thing, the less convenient thing.
The frustrating, unreasonable truth being despite everything—despite the sighs and the scowls and the years worth of dismissal—Callan pulled at me in a way I never argued myself out of, not merely magnetism; he lacked boyishness, charm, or aesthetic appeal.
He was weathered, intense, the type of individual who seemed to inhabit a room in a manner distinct from everyone else, almost as if gravity somehow were stronger around him, and my stomach, that disloyal bitch, noticed every time.
More than once I’d found reasons to linger near the reef exhibit—salinity checks that didn’t need checking—while he cleaned the tanks.
The way he moved in the water was so different from how he moved on land: unhurried, certain.
Water droplets tracing slow paths down the lean muscles of his back while he worked with the focused quiet of someone who had made peace with silence long ago.
I’d told myself it was observational.
My profession was marine biology. Observation was my job.
I braced for the impact of his attention: the look, the sigh, the measured comment about punctuality, or responsibility, or whatever failure of mine he’d decided to lead with today.
It never came; he didn’t even glance at me.
He appeared to be somewhere else, staring down at the concrete floor with the focused intensity of a man trying to burn a hole through it, jaw clenching, the hand not holding the phone pressed flat against the wall like he needed something solid to push against.
Then I heard it, low, barely audible beneath the constant murmur of the aquarium.
“I don’t care anymore, Sadie.” A pause, the kind that meant whoever on the other end was talking, and he was done listening. “Fuck you.” Another pause, shorter. “No. I’m done with this.”
His voice dropped even further, scraping the bottom register.
“Fuck you too!”
I stood still; I had prepared myself for a lot of things this morning: his disapproval, his silence, the particular brand of exhausting that was a Tuesday with Callan Ward.
I had not prepared for this.
His grip tightened on the phone until his knuckles became white, the tendons in his forearm standing out in sharp relief.
“You’re the one who cheated.” Each word clipped, deliberate, the voice of a man who had moved beyond anger into a place colder and more precise. “You’re the one who left. And now you want the house?”
I stopped halfway through shrugging off my jacket.
I had somewhere to go. Tanks to check, metrics to log, an entire morning’s worth of responsibilities that required my immediate attention.
I stayed where I was.
Because the thing about Callan—infuriating, scowling Callan who had made my professional life a quiet misery for the better part of six years—never once had I considered that he had a life outside these walls. That somewhere beyond the aquarium, things happened to him. Complicated human things.
Painful things.
Oh.
Oh, shit.
Mr. Crankass was getting divorced.
The man I had privately referred to, on more than one occasion, as the human equivalent of a warning label, was getting divorced.
“No.” His voice dropped again, quieter now but somehow more dangerous for it.
“No, you don’t get to do this.” A breath, short and controlled, as if he were measuring it. “You don’t get to walk away and then come back when it’s convenient for you.”
The words registered differently than I expected.
I finished taking off my jacket, buying myself time I didn’t need. My eyes were on the floor, granting him the privacy of my pretending not to listen, which was the least I could do, given that I was absolutely listening.
He stopped pacing.
His back became rigid, and his free hand dragged down his face. It was such a human gesture, unguarded in a way I’d never seen from him before.
Because Callan didn’t do unguarded.
He was controlled the way tidal systems are controlled—operating according to rules so deeply embedded they looked like nature. Even at his worst, even when he could be his most calculated brand of insufferable, there appeared to be intention behind it. Structure. He didn’t snap. He didn’t slip.
Until apparently now.
This was different.
Raw in a way that made me feel like a trespasser, like I’d wandered through a door I wasn’t supposed to find and was now standing in a room that wasn’t meant for me. Something surfaced underneath the composure, and what was showing through wasn’t anger.
It was hurt. Plain and unadorned and very real.
A woman’s voice erupted from the phone—thin and distant, the words indistinct, but the fury in them carrying perfectly across the room.
His jaw tightened.
“I don’t care what your lawyer said.” Low, and controlled. “It’s not happening.”
Whatever she said next made the muscle in his jaw flicker.
He said nothing for a long moment but stood there, absorbing it.
Then, quieter, rougher.
“I put everything into our home. You moved out. You left.”
I knew I was still standing there.
I eased toward the locker area in what I hoped appeared a casual, completely natural movement that in no way suggested I had been absorbing every word of a private conversation.
The aquarium’s morning quiet worked against me—that hush before the building filled with visitors, when every small sound carried further than it should.
My shoes scraped against the floor. The faint shift of my jacket.
Sounds that, in any other context, wouldn’t exist.
Callan turned.
His eyes found me instantly.
And there it was—except it wasn’t. Not the look I expected, not the flat, practiced dismissal, or the slow-burning irritation he’d spent years perfecting specifically, I sometimes thought, for my benefit.
He looked—in the space between one breath and the next, Callan Ward looked like someone who was hurting.
Then the walls went up.
Fast and practiced—not from weakness, but from long habit, from years of having learned that open water isn’t safe. His expression shuttered. His jaw set. His shoulders squared back into the man I recognized.
And just like that, he became Callan the dick again.
He turned away without a word, pressing the phone to his ear.
“I have to go.” Flat. Final. “We’re done here.”
He hung up before she could respond.
The silence that followed seemed different from ordinary silence—heavier somehow, with the shape of everything that had just been said still hanging in it.
I became very absorbed in my locker. Deeply, profoundly absorbed. My fingers found the zipper of my bag and worked it with the focused concentration of someone defusing a bomb.
I waited for it anyway.
The comment about my arrival time, the measured disappointment, delivered in that low, even voice that somehow made casual criticism feel like a formal verdict.
It didn’t come.
Instead, I just heard him breathing, steady and slow.
Then he walked past
me, close enough that I caught it—rain and salt and something underneath both that I couldn’t place or name, a feeling that made the completely contradictory parts of me want to step away and close the distance at the same time.
He didn’t say a word.
And somehow that was worse than if he’d laid into me. At least then I’d know what to do with him. At least then he’d make sense.
Instead, he’d gone and done the unforgivable.
He’d made himself human.