The Ocean Remembers

The Girl Who Stayed for Dinner

I retreat to the one room where I have always been able to think.

My library sits beneath the living floors, a long, windowless space lined with books from floor to ceiling. Notebooks cover the long table, their pages weighed down by whatever happens to be within reach. I designed it this way deliberately. No windows, no distractions, no reminders that there is a world beyond the walls.

Hours pass before I notice how quiet the building has become.

I have spent most of the afternoon writing, trying to bury the morning beneath a new chapter. It is what I do every day. I wake from the same nightmare, endure the panic that follows, work out until my body feels steady again, eat something, and disappear into my own world.

Writing is the only part of my life that still feels entirely mine.

On paper, I can make a man face his worst fear and decide whether he survives it. I can give a woman a second chance, bring a dead man back through memory, or send an entire fictional city beneath the sea.

I can control everything.

Perhaps that is why millions of people read my books.

They speculate about my face, my life, and the kind of person capable of writing such bleak stories.

They have no idea that their mysterious author spends most of his life avoiding the front door.

I doubt they would find that particularly entertaining.

I reach for my glass of water, take a drink, and return to the manuscript.

For a while, I manage to forget about the woman upstairs.

Then I remember that she is still there.

Camille Bennett.

The stranger Nathan has decided to install in my home without asking me first.

I press my pen against the paper, harder than necessary.

Nathan.

For ten years, he has been the one person I have never had to question. He was there when the condolences became unbearable, when the visitors stopped coming, and when I began withdrawing from a world that seemed determined to move on without me.

He kept coming.

At least, he did until work began taking up more of his time.

His promotion to senior accountant at his father's company, Whitmore Financial Group, has made his visits less frequent. I understand that he has responsibilities of his own. I have never expected him to spend his life sitting in my apartment, making sure I remember what day it is.

Still, there is a difference between being busy and making decisions about someone else's life without consulting them.

Apparently, Nathan has yet to discover it.

I set my pen down and lean back in my chair.

We have known each other for as long as I can remember. Our families were close long before either of us was born. The Ashfords and the Whitmores shared dinners, holidays, and the kind of familiarity that made their homes feel like extensions of one another's.

Nathan and I grew up with that same closeness.

At school, we competed over practically everything. He was disciplined, organised, and determined to be the best. I was more interested in whatever had caught my attention that week, which usually meant a book I should have been reading at home or a story I was supposed to be writing.

Somehow, I still managed to beat him often enough to make his life miserable.

He never accepted defeat gracefully.

I remember one afternoon when we were thirteen, sitting across from each other after another examination. Nathan had spent the entire week preparing for it. I had spent most of that time writing a story about a boy who discovered a secret room beneath his school.

I scored higher.

He accused me of cheating.

I accused him of being a sore loser.

Our parents spent dinner listening to us argue over the results while my father suggested we should start charging admission.

Those were good days.

Nathan's father would laugh at our arguments, and my mother would tell us that if we put half as much effort into cooperating as we did into competing, we might accomplish something useful.

My father called us the firm.

Ashford and Whitmore.

He said it so often that, for a while, I assumed Nathan and I would grow up and build something together.

My father was Thomas Ashford, a respected attorney who could spend an entire evening arguing a case and still come home with enough patience to read my terrible early stories. He marked my manuscripts, criticised lazy sentences, and took my ambitions seriously long before anyone else had a reason to.

My mother, Margaret, was a judge. She believed in discipline, fairness, and finishing what you started. She also believed I spent far too much time with my head buried in books.

She was usually right.

They died when I was fifteen.

I do not allow myself to stay with that thought for long. There are memories I can revisit without much trouble, but there are others I approach only when I have no choice.

The years before their deaths belong to a different life.

The years after belong to this one.

Nathan was there through the transition. He never demanded that I become the person I had been before, and he never pretended that losing my parents was something I could simply get over.

He stayed when other people found reasons to leave.

That is not something I forget.

Which makes today's decision even harder to understand.

I pick up my pen again, determined to finish the paragraph waiting on the page.

Then I hear a knock.

I stop writing.

For a moment, I do not move.

Nobody knocks on the library door.

Nathan has been coming here for years, and even he usually announces himself from the stairs. There is no established routine for someone seeking me out in this room.

The knock comes again.

“The table is set.”

Camille.

I close my eyes briefly.

Of course.

I turn in my chair, and there she is, standing in the doorway with one hand resting against the frame.

For a second, I forget how to respond.

Something about her standing there, telling me that dinner is ready, pulls a memory from somewhere I have spent years trying not to look.

I am younger. Much younger.

I am sitting in my room with a book open in front of me, so absorbed in the pages that I have lost track of time. My mother appears at the doorway and tells me to come downstairs.

I ask for five more minutes.

She tells me she has already called me twice.

I promise I am almost finished.

She reminds me that food does not become more appealing simply because it has gone cold.

I can still remember the sound of her voice. The quiet patience in it. The way she would lean against the doorframe and wait for me to put the book down, even when she knew I would try to negotiate for another few minutes.

It was such an ordinary thing.

I never imagined I would spend the rest of my life wishing I could hear it again.

The memory lasts only a moment before reality catches up with me.

My mother is dead.

The woman standing in my doorway is Camille Bennett, someone I barely recognise, and I have no idea why she is looking at me as though she has walked into a room where something has broken.

I look down at my desk.

My eyes are burning.

I wipe at them, irritated with myself, but the tears have already gathered. I try to steady my breathing, to regain the composure I had a moment ago.

It should not be this easy for a memory to undo me.

I hear Camille move closer.

“Dorian?”

Her voice has changed. The sharpness from our earlier argument is gone.

“Are you all right?”

I clear my throat.

“I'm fine.”

The answer comes out rough enough to make the lie obvious.

She stops a short distance from my desk. I can feel her watching me, but she does not reach for me or ask me to explain what happened.

For that, I am grateful.

I do not want her sympathy. I do not want questions. Most of all, I do not want to explain why the sight of a woman standing in a doorway has left me struggling to hold myself together.

Camille glances toward the stairs.

“Dinner's ready,” she says again, more quietly. “You should eat something.”

I turn away and wipe my face once more.

“Why are you still here?” I ask.

The irritation in my voice is deliberate. It is easier to sound angry than to let her see anything else.

“It's late.”

She looks at me as though she is trying to decide whether I am serious.

“The contract says I stay until the period is over.”

I turn back.

“What?”

“The contract.” She gestures vaguely toward the stairs. “I'm employed to manage the household for a month while Nathan is away. That includes staying here.”

I stare at her.

“You're staying in my house?”

“Yes.”

“Living here?”

“Yes, Dorian. Living here.”

For several seconds, I say nothing.

I had understood that Nathan wanted someone to manage the household. I had not understood that he intended to have that person sleep under my roof, move through my rooms, and become part of the daily routine I have spent ten years keeping to myself.

I look at Camille again.

She seems perfectly comfortable standing there, as though living with a man who has just ordered her out of his home is an entirely reasonable arrangement.

“Did Nathan tell you I agreed to this?”

Her expression shifts.

“He told me you might be difficult about the arrangement.”

“That wasn't my question.”

“No. He didn't say you'd agreed.”

I let out a short, disbelieving laugh.

At least she is honest.

“He hired you without my permission.”

“He hired me to do a job.”

“In my home.”

“Yes.”

“And you thought that was acceptable?”

“I thought the person who employed me had the authority to offer me the position.” She folds her arms. “I didn't break into your house, Dorian. I answered a job offer. I signed a contract. I showed up to work.”

I have no immediate answer to that.

It is an inconvenient argument because it is a reasonable one.

Camille has done nothing more than accept an arrangement that someone else made. She needs the job, and I cannot blame her for refusing to abandon it simply because I dislike the circumstances.

That does not mean I have to like her presence.

“I don't want anyone living here,” I tell her.

“I understand.”

“Do you?”

“Yes. You have made that very clear.”

Her tone is calm, but there is a hint of irritation beneath it.

“I'll give you space. I'll knock before entering rooms. I won't bother you when you're working, and if you don't want company, you won't have to entertain me. But I'm not leaving tonight because you decided you don't like me.”

I look at her, searching for some sign that she is trying to provoke me.

She isn't.

She looks tired, perhaps a little annoyed, but she also looks determined to do the job she came here to do.

I turn toward the glass of water on my desk.

Ten years.

Ten years of carefully arranging my life so that I know what comes next. Ten years of keeping my surroundings predictable because the moment I lose control, my mind has a way of taking me somewhere I do not want to go.

And now a stranger is standing in my library, telling me she intends to stay.

I had thought the hardest part of today was waking up from the ocean.

I may have been wrong.

Camille glances toward the stairs again.

“Are you coming to eat?”

I look at her.

“No.”

She nods once.

“All right. I'll leave something for you.”

Then she turns and walks away, leaving me alone with my books, my unfinished manuscript, and the knowledge that she will be here tomorrow.

And the day after that.

For the first time in ten years, I have no idea what tomorrow is going to look like.