Chapter 11
Eleven
Sloane
Iwoke with a start.
For a second, I didn’t recognize my surroundings.
My back throbbed—a deep cramp running from my shoulders all the way down into my hips. My neck seized the moment I tried to move, stiff and burning. My head pounded faintly, the ache that comes from hours spent in the same position.
I blinked. Stared at the dim ceiling above me.
The faint blue glow of the aquarium lights shifted across the walls, slow and rippling.
That’s when it hit me.
Not my bed. Not home.
The aquarium.
The woman.
The blood.
Peter.
My breath caught.
I shifted suddenly, panic jolting through me—only to land against something solid and warm.
Callan groaned.
The sound low and rough, and I realized where my face had been resting, on his chest.
I froze.
Wrapped in his arms.
During the night, I’d curled into him completely—my body tucked against his, my head on his chest, one arm heavy around my back as if he’d pulled me in without thinking.
He sat pressed flat against the heavy door leading to the main aquarium floor, head tilted to one side, chin resting at an angle near the top of my head that surely wasn’t comfortable for over five minutes, let alone the whole night.
He’d fallen asleep too.
My stomach turned over.
“Fuck,” he muttered, voice thick with sleep and pain. “I’m gonna pay for sleeping like that.”
I scrambled off him. Heat flooded my face despite everything; that gurgled embarrassment should have been the last thing I should be able to summon right now.
“Sorry,” I said, voice hoarse from crying and sleep.
The moment I moved, he sucked in a sharp breath.
“Jesus—” he hissed, hand flying to his neck. “Fuck.”
He winced hard, rolling his shoulder, whole face tightening as his body ground and popped in a way that sounded brutal.
“Ugh,” he muttered through his teeth. “This is what I get for being old.”
Despite everything, a weak laugh escaped me. It surprised us.
He glanced at me, and for a second, neither of us said anything.
But the rest of it came back. All of it. Fast and depressing.
His expression changed too. The tired humor drained from his face, and something harder settled in its place—heavier. Reality pressing down on both of us, filling the space with everything we’d tried to outrun by falling asleep.
He rubbed a hand over his face, exhaling slowly through his nose.
“You okay?” he asked.
Quieter now. More careful. Like he didn’t want the actual answer.
I nodded.
“I think so.”
For a moment, we sat there.
Listening.
Waiting.
The aquarium swished around us. The door held. Shut. Locked. Unmoved.
Nothing had changed. Nothing had gotten in.
I didn’t understand why that made it worse.
I pushed myself to my feet, every muscle protesting.
The room swayed. I had to catch myself against the wall, palm flat on cold concrete, and wait for the dizziness to pass. My whole body seemed tired—drained, wrung out, like I’d run for miles instead of surviving a night on the floor.
Callan was still sitting against the door, one knee bent, rubbing the back of his neck with a grimace that said he was hurting worse than he’d admit.
I held my hand out to him.
He looked at it for a second; something flickered across his face—not quite surprise, but close. Like the gesture caught him off guard.
But he took it.
His hands were rough beneath mine. Warm. Solid.
I tightened my grip and pulled.
He stood with a low grunt, his face tightening as his shoulder moved through the movement.
“Jesus,” he muttered. “Remind me never to do that again.”
“You’re not that old,” I said.
He gave me a look.
“I feel that old.”
Despite everything, the corner of my mouth twitched.
I glanced toward the interior door that led deeper into the aquarium, and back at him.
“Do you think we can access the roof?” I asked. “Even with the shutters down?”
He frowned slightly, thinking.
The roof access was mostly internal—emergency maintenance ladders, service corridors that ran above the exhibit halls.
“Possibly,” he said. “Why?”
“I want to see,” I said, “what’s happening out there?”
The words came out harder than I expected. Saying it out loud made it real in a way that thinking it hadn’t.
He studied me for a second, his eyes searching my face for something—for what, I couldn’t name. He nodded once.
“Maybe,” he said again. “But first…”
He glanced down the hallway.
“Let’s go to the cafeteria. Make some coffee.”
Coffee.
The word alone did something to me, small and stupid and completely disproportionate. My throat tightened, and for a second I didn’t trust myself to speak.
Normal. The idea of something normal.
I nodded.
We started towards the cafeteria, our footsteps echoing through the empty corridors.
The aquarium seemed different now, not simply quiet. Every door we passed was closed. Every light dimmed to its overnight setting.
There should have been voices. Laughter. The squeak of shoes on polished floors. Kids pressing their faces to the glass.
* * *
We reached the cafeteria, and I stopped inside the doorway.
The space was massive. Rows of tables stretched across the floor, chairs tucked neatly into place, everything still arranged for a crowd that would never show up. The industrial kitchen beyond the serving counter gleamed faintly under the low lighting, all stainless steel and clean surfaces.
This place fed hundreds of people every
day—school groups, families, staff grabbing lunch.
I felt some relief because that meant food, supplies, enough to last, to buy us time.
Thank God for that.
Callan moved behind the counter without a word. He grabbed a pot, filled it with water, and set it into the industrial coffee machine. His hands moved with the easy, automatic efficiency of someone who’d done this a thousand mornings before.
The machine clicked on, started to gurgle and then hiss.
The sound filled the silence, and something about it—the sheer normalcy of it—made my shoulders relax.
I leaned against the counter across from him, arms crossed tightly over my chest.
Peter’s face flashed through my mind.
The picture. The blood smeared across the wall behind him.
Help.
I waited for it to hit me, really hit
me—devastation, grief, rage. Something big and consuming, that would knock me sideways and prove I was still the person I was supposed to be.
But all I felt was numb, like the part of me that was supposed to break had already been broken a long time ago.
I stared at the floor.
I was thirty years old.
In four years, I’d never told him I loved him.
Not once.
Not because I didn’t care. I cared. I cared about him in ways I couldn’t even articulate to myself, let alone to him.
But I couldn’t say it.
The words had always gotten stuck somewhere between my chest and my throat, caught in a place I couldn’t reach.
Like the connection between what I felt and what I could express had been wired wrong from the start.
Like something inside me had never learned how to do that one simple thing that everyone else seemed to manage without thinking.
What kind of person does that?
What kind of person spends years beside someone—shares a bed with them, eats dinner with them, builds a life with them—and never once gives them that?
I let out a slow breath.
Perhaps he’d known, anyway. Possibly he’d seen it in other things: the way I made his coffee without asking, the way I always checked the locks twice because it bothered him when I didn’t, the way I stayed, even when staying was hard.
Or maybe he hadn’t.
Maybe he’d spent years waiting for something I would never give him. But to be fair, he never said it either. Maybe that’s what drew me to him in the first place—he was broken in the same way I was.
Now he was gone. I’d never get to say it, never get the chance to untangle our shitshow of a relationship. My chest ached with the weight of it. In all honesty, we would have ended soon, anyway. But that didn’t mean I wanted him dead. Didn’t mean I wanted him unhappy.
This wasn’t the time for grieving, so I focused on the now.
I looked up.
Callan stood with his back to me, leaning against the counter while the coffee brewed. His posture was rigid. His head was down. His hands were braced on the edge of the steel countertop.
He looked tired.
Not just physically. Not just the stiffness and the terrible night’s sleep.
Worn. Deeply, thoroughly worn. Like someone who had already lost everything once and had just kept going because stopping wasn’t something he knew how to do.
“What do you think is happening?” I asked quietly.
He didn’t answer right away.
The coffee machine hissed, dripped, filled the silence with its small, steady sounds. Without turning around, he said, “Whatever it is, it’s bad.”
Simple. Honest. True.
No theories. No reassurances. No bullshit.
He glanced at me over his shoulder then. His eyes were tired but steady.
“We’ll figure it out,” he said.
I didn’t know if that was true. I didn’t know if there was anything left to figure out, or if the world outside those shuttered doors had already moved past the point of figuring.
But I nodded anyway.
Because for now, standing in this empty cafeteria with crappy coffee brewing and lights overhead, he was the only solid thing I had left. And I was going to hold on to that for as long as I could.
* * *
I lifted my head from where it had been resting on the table when Callan set the cup down in front of me.
The ceramic clicked against the surface. Steam curled up from the rim. Beside it, he placed a wrapped muffin, still sealed in plastic from the rack.
I looked at it for a second.
He’d made me coffee. He’d brought me food.
“Thanks,” I mumbled.
My voice was fragile in a way I didn’t like.
I wrapped my hands around the cup, and the heat seeped into my fingers. I held on tighter than I needed to. Lifted it. Took a sip.
Warm. Bitter, but right now, the best thing I’d ever tasted.
Heat spread through my chest and loosened something that had been wound tight since yesterday.