The Ocean Remembers

The Lights in the Rain

Her smile is gone, but she does not do what I expect. She does not tense up or reach for an excuse. Instead, she pulls a chair away from the wall, brings it into the middle of the room, and sits down, her eyes still moving across the photographs, diagrams, and years of work covering the walls.

Her calmness only makes me more eager to hear her answer.

“A week ago, Nathan called me,” she begins. “It was the first time we’d spoken since graduation. Seven years, and suddenly he was offering me a way to make some money.”

She turns her phone over in her hands.

“He knew things he shouldn’t have known. That I’d lost my job. That my bills were piling up. He didn’t explain how he knew, and honestly, I wasn’t in a position to ask.” She lets out a short breath. “We met the next day at a restaurant near my house. He made me an offer and gave me an advance. It was almost exactly what I needed for my rent, which was due that afternoon. Without it, I would have lost my place.”

She looks at me.

“So I accepted. I needed the money, and he had it. It was that simple.”

“And the job was me.”

“The job was you. Look after you until he gets back. Cook, keep the house running, make sure you eat.” She pauses. “And keep track of you. Your schedule, which rooms you go into, what you do throughout the day. He wanted to know everything.”

“Everything?”

“Enough to make me uncomfortable.” She holds my gaze. “I asked why a man would need a detailed report on where his best friend goes inside his own home. He told me about you, about what you’ve been through, and I convinced myself it was just a worried friend trying to look after someone who refuses to let anyone close.”

Her eyes return to the photographs.

“That was what I believed when I came here. I intended to do the job I had agreed to.”

“What changed?”

“Last night.”

Her voice softens.

“I heard you during that nightmare. I saw what it did to you. And I realised this wasn't simply a man who preferred to be alone.”

She leans forward slightly.

“You're not just shut away from the world, Dorian. You're trapped inside something, too. Whatever happened to you, you're still living through it, even when you don't understand what you're seeing. I watched you fighting something last night that nobody else could see, and I thought”

“Stop.”

The word comes out sharper than I intend, though I make no effort to soften it.

Camille falls silent.

“I appreciate your concern,” I say, deliberately cooling my voice, “but I don't need a stranger my friend hired to come into my home and start analysing me. You've been here for a day. You don't know me, and you certainly don't know anything.”

“That's not what I meant.”

“I value my privacy. I've built my entire life around it. The last thing I need is someone I barely know standing in the middle of my private space, deciding she understands me after a few hours.”

I hold her gaze.

The words land exactly as I intend them to.

I watch the openness in her expression disappear, replaced by hurt that quickly hardens into anger. It is the reaction I wanted. Something that would make her stop asking questions and stop looking at me as though there were still something worth reaching for.

I hate seeing it.

She rises without another word, returns the chair to its place against the wall, and walks out through the hanging clothes.

She does not look back.

A moment later, I hear a door shut down the hallway.

I remain where I am, surrounded by my parents' faces and ten years of unanswered questions.

The quiet returns, but it no longer feels the way it did before. It has taken on the shape of someone who was here a moment ago and is now gone.

I should feel safe again. The room is mine. My secrets are still hidden behind the clothes, and the door to the rest of my life is closed.

Instead, I feel the cost of what I have done settling heavily in my chest.

Nathan's request troubles me, too. Keep track of Dorian. Which rooms he enters. What he does throughout the day.

I turn the words over in my mind, and the more I consider them, the less I like them. This is more than asking someone to make sure I eat or that I am not neglecting myself. There is a level of detail to it that I cannot explain.

For a moment, I wonder what Nathan really wants to know.

Then I stop myself.

This is Nathan.

Nathan, who stayed when everyone else began to drift away. Nathan, who sat beside me through the first year, when the grief was so heavy that some days I could barely get through them. Nathan, who kept coming long after it would have been easier to stop trying.

For ten years, he has been the one constant connection between me and a world I have struggled to face.

A man can be worried about his friend. He can make mistakes in trying to help. Perhaps Nathan believes knowing my routines will somehow make it easier to look after me while he is away.

I can’t question his decision without questioning every year of loyalty that came before it.

I am not ready to do that to him.

My thoughts return to Camille.

She is the first person in years who has made me laugh without making me feel foolish for it. She stood in this room, surrounded by everything the people closest to me have dismissed, and did not look at me with pity.

She told me she trusted me.

And I repaid her by speaking to her as though she were an enemy.

I want to take back what I said. I want to explain that I did not mean all of it, that her concern frightened me because it came too close to places I have spent years keeping untouched.

But I do not go after her.

Instead, I tell myself that I am protecting her.

If my suspicions are right, if there is something more to my parents' deaths than the explanation everyone has accepted, then getting involved in my life could draw Camille into something she does not understand. I cannot ask her to carry the weight of questions that have consumed me for a decade.

Better that she be angry with me than become entangled in whatever I have spent all these years trying to uncover.

That is what I tell myself.

I do not examine too closely the fact that I have decided what is best for her without giving her the chance to decide for herself.

The room grows quiet around me.

My eyes feel heavy. I have barely slept in two nights, and the stillness settles over me until the photographs begin to blur at the edges.

Rain taps softly against the glass.

My father is driving.

I'm in the back seat, watching the road through the windscreen between the two front seats. The wipers move steadily across the glass, pushing away the rain as the highway stretches ahead, black and shining beneath the headlights.

My mother sits beside my father in the passenger seat, turned slightly towards him. The heater fills the car with warmth, and the sound of the rain against the roof is almost soothing.

“You know,” she says, “at this speed, we might get home tomorrow.”

My father keeps his eyes on the road.

“It's raining.”

“It's barely raining.”

“It's raining enough.”

She laughs. “You drive like you're afraid of the road.”

“I drive like someone who understands that wet roads are slippery.”

“And I drive like someone who understands that a car has an accelerator.”

“Wonderful. Next time, you can drive.”

“Gladly.”

He shakes his head, but I catch the smile he tries to hide.

I laugh from the back seat.

My mother glances over her shoulder at me, her eyes bright with amusement.

“Don't encourage him. He'll use this conversation as an excuse to drive even slower.”

“I heard that,” my father says.

“You were meant to.”

We laugh again.

For a moment, there is nothing beyond the warmth of the car, the familiar sound of my parents teasing each other, and the road carrying us home. I lean back in my seat, content to listen to them.

My father glances at me through the rearview mirror.

“Quiet back there. What are you thinking about?”

“Nothing.”

“That's suspicious.”

“Not everyone talks as much as Mum.”

My mother gasps in mock offence.

“Did you hear that?”

“I did,” my father says. “He's clearly inherited your attitude.”

“And your sense of humour.”

“Unfortunately.”

Their laughter fills the car again, and I join them.

Then the rain grows heavier.

The wipers sweep faster, but water continues to gather across the windscreen. The road ahead shines beneath the headlights, its white markings appearing and disappearing beneath the rushing tyres.

My father slows down a little more.

My mother opens her mouth to tease him again, but something catches her attention.

Two lights appear in the distance.

At first, they are nothing more than small points of brightness against the rain. Another vehicle approaching in the opposite lane.

I barely pay attention.

Then the lights grow larger.

Fast.

My father falls silent.

The brightness spreads across the wet road, reflecting off the water until the approaching lights seem to multiply beneath us. They are moving far too quickly, growing larger with every passing second.

My mother's smile fades.

“Thomas?”

My father tightens his grip on the steering wheel.

I sit forward, trying to see past the rain.

The lights are closer now. Much closer.

Their glare cuts through the darkness, swallowing the road ahead. The wipers sweep across the windscreen, but for a moment, all I can see is white light and the blurred outline of something moving towards us.

My father shifts his hands on the wheel.

My mother turns towards him.

And then she reaches back, her hand stretching towards me.

The lights rush closer, blazing through the rain, filling the windscreen until there is nowhere else to look.

They are coming straight at us.