The Ocean Remembers

The First Person to Believe Me

It takes me half a second longer than it should to understand where my hand is.

My palm rests against the curve of her backside, and the instant I register it, I snatch it away as though I have touched a hot stove. Camille makes a strangled sound and scrambles to her feet. I follow a second later, and we end up standing an arm’s length apart amid a dozen fallen shirts.

I clear my throat.

She clears hers.

The silence that follows is enormous and entirely unhelpful. I look at a point just past her shoulder. She looks somewhere beyond mine. Somewhere in the apartment, a clock I rarely notice suddenly seems impossibly loud.

“I’m sorry,” we say simultaneously.

Silence again.

“You first,” we say together.

And that is what does it. The sheer absurdity of our timing. She presses her lips together, trying to hold it in, and I feel the corners of my own mouth lifting. A second later, we are both laughing.

Properly laughing.

Her laughter feeds mine, and mine seems to make hers worse. Neither of us can stop without looking at the other, and looking at each other only starts it all over again.

It lasts longer than it should. She wipes at her eyes while I lean against the doorframe, trying to catch my breath.

Then, beneath the laughter, something settles inside me.

I have laughed more in the last twenty-four hours than I have in ten years.

The realisation catches me off guard. A decade of careful quiet, controlled routines, and days arranged to keep the world at a distance, and this woman has been in my home for barely a day and has already managed to draw something out of me that I thought I had forgotten how to feel.

I do not know what to do with that thought, so I leave it alone.

For now, I let the laughter fade and enjoy the unfamiliar lightness it leaves behind.

Then Camille straightens and looks past me.

“So, what’s in there?”

Before I can answer, she starts towards the open panel.

“Camille.” I move to stop her. “Don’t. That’s private. Please go back.”

“I’m not going to touch anything.”

“Camille.”

But she is already through the opening.

I follow, torn between the urge to pull her back and the knowledge that I cannot bring myself to grab her. By the time I push through the hanging clothes, she is standing in the middle of the room, slowly taking everything in.

She is not frightened.

Her eyes move across the walls, taking in the photographs, the diagrams, the printouts, and the strings connecting one piece of information to another. She looks at the years of work I have gathered in this small room, and her expression holds something closer to astonishment than concern.

“You did all this,” she says. “By yourself?”

“Camille, I need you to leave.”

She turns towards me, but instead of responding to my request, she looks back at the wall.

“Your parents?”

The question stops me.

For a moment, I forget that I want her out of the room. I look at the photographs, at my parents' faces frozen in a time I can never return to, and then back at her.

“I think the accident was suspicious,” I say. “I've thought so for ten years. No one believes me.”

The words come out flat, but there is nothing flat about what they contain.

Ten years of questions, unanswered calls, dismissed concerns, and conversations that always end with someone trying to convince me to accept what everyone else has accepted. Ten years of watching people's expressions change as they decide that my grief has become something else.

I wait for Camille's face to change.

I expect the familiar hesitation, the careful sympathy, the subtle shift from listening to managing me.

Instead, she looks at the photographs for another moment before turning back to me.

“I trust you.”

The words strike somewhere I have spent ten years trying to protect.

I have armour for doubt. I have built it piece by piece against the officer who stopped returning my calls, against Nathan's careful sadness, and against his parents' patient attempts to help me move on. I know how to stand behind my suspicions when someone questions them. I know how to defend what I believe, even when I have no proof strong enough to make anyone else see it.

But I do not know what to do with someone who looks at the evidence of my obsession and tells me she trusts me.

Something gives in my chest.

My eyes sting before I can stop it. I turn my head, but not quickly enough to hide it from her.

She notices. I know she does.

She says nothing about my tears. Instead, she steps closer and places her hand against my back, moving it slowly between my shoulders.

And suddenly, I am somewhere else.

My mother used to do that. Whenever my father's voice grew sharp over some small mistake and I stood there, stiff with the effort of holding myself together, she would come beside me and rub my back in exactly the same way.

She never argued with him in front of me. She simply placed her hand against my back and moved it gently up and down.

It was her way of telling me that she was there, that the moment would pass, that I was all right.

Now Camille is doing the same thing.

For a brief moment, the years between then and now seem to disappear. I am a boy standing beside my mother, receiving the comfort I never knew I would spend so many years missing.

I lock my jaw and try to steady my breathing.

I have not allowed myself to feel this kind of comfort in a long time. I am not even sure I realised how much I missed it until now.

I do not tell Camille what her gesture reminds me of. I let her hand remain where it is and concentrate on breathing until the tightness in my chest begins to ease.

For a moment, the room feels different. The photographs, the notes, the questions that have occupied my life for ten years are still there, but they no longer seem to fill every available space.

There are two people in the room now.

Then Camille's phone vibrates against the table.

The sound breaks the moment.

She withdraws her hand and reaches for the phone. I watch her glance at the screen, and something shifts in her expression. It is subtle, barely there, but I notice it.

“Nathan?” I ask.

“Yes.”

She reads the message, then turns the phone facedown on the table.

I should have looked away. Instead, I catch the name at the top of the screen before it disappears.

Nathan Whitmore.

“Everything all right?” I ask.

“Of course.” She smiles, but the smile comes a moment too late. “He just wants an update.”

An update.

The word settles uneasily between us.

I look around the room: the photographs of my parents, the documents, the unanswered questions, and the years of work spread across the walls. I have spent a decade trying to make sense of what happened to them, and Nathan has never asked me for an update on any of it. He already knows the shape of my days, the limits of my world, and the things I refuse to discuss.

So what does he need an update about?

The thought arrives quietly, but once it is there, I cannot ignore it.

Nathan arranged for Camille to come here while he was away. He did it without asking me, and she arrived already knowing who I was and what she might have to deal with. I have accepted the arrangement because I assumed I understood it well enough.

Now I am not so certain.

I think about the instructions Nathan must have given her, the conversations they have had since she arrived, and the messages I have not seen. I wonder what she has told him about me, about my routines, about the way I live behind these walls.

I do not know whether there is anything to suspect. I have no reason to believe she has betrayed me.

But I have spent the last few minutes letting myself believe that someone finally understands me, and I have not stopped to consider how much I actually know about the person standing in front of me.

I turn towards her.

“What exactly did he hire you to do, Camille?”

Her smile disappears.