Reach

The salt air carried the sound of waves breaking against Grand Anse beach, a steady rhythm became the soundtrack to their new life. Jack stood at the floor-to-ceiling window, watching the moon paint a silver path across the ocean. Two weeks in this house; he still caught himself holding his breath at the view.

They'd found it through a friend of a friend, a retired architect from Port of Spain who'd built his dream home here thirty years ago and never quite managed to let it go, even after moving back to Trinidad. The place was all angles, glass, designed to blur the line between inside and outside, to make you feel like you were living in the landscape rather than on it. At night, with the lights low and the windows open, you could almost convince yourself the ocean was in the room with you.

Jack grew up on the island, but not in a house like this: one that cost more than his parents had earned in their entire lives, with imported hardwood, and a kitchen bigger than the apartment he'd shared with four roommates in Brooklyn. The irony struck him. He'd spent years building systems for others, helping corporations and governments coordinate resources. Now, he could finally afford the view he'd dreamed of as a child. Yet the view changed nothing; it didn't fix the world.

"No, I have not forsaken anyone nor do I want to lead people. What's the point?" His voice rose, sharp with frustration. "All who have tried are either dead or have betrayed their own."

Sheena sat on the edge of their low-slung sofa, a glass of rum punch untouched on the coffee table between them. She'd been quiet for most of his rant, letting him work through whatever had been building since dinner. She knew him well enough by now: four years together, two of them in the chaos of New York and two more navigating the strange limbo of coming back to the Caribbean, to recognize when he needed to talk himself out, not be talked down.