No, it had been an instinctual act, the reaction of muscle and tendon to electrical commands barked down his central nervous system by some alert sentry bunkered deep in the recesses of his brain. The primitive need for protection, perhaps. An ancient defense mechanism triggered by approaching danger as yet unrecognized by his conscious mind, like animals that minutes or even hours before an earthquake could be seen scurrying for safety.

But protection from what? He considered the question. Was he afraid of his own child? He had to admit that he was. Or, if not afraid, at least wary. And now he was hiding from her, shutting himself in his office, safe behind a door that, although it had no lock and could be opened easily, created the illusion of safety.

He laughed at himself. You’re like a crab hiding under a rock, he thought reproachfully. Hoping the octopus won’t reach under and pull you out. He didn’t open the door.

Leaning back in the chair, he listened to its familiar squeak and relaxed slightly. This was his place, his refuge. Apart from beneath the water, he felt most at home here, surrounded by the artifacts of his life: the books and papers, the pile of journals (some more than two years old) he intended to read, the coffee mug emblazoned with the name of the dive boat on which he’d spent two weeks in British Columbia photographing the underwater life of the Queen Charlotte Islands. On his desk sat a photograph of his beloved Cadlina flavomaculata, taken himself on one of his many dives at Pt. Lobos.

His office was a museum, a repository for the things that made him who he was. It was the one room in the house to which he had devoted the most (albeit still minimal) attention. The walls were painted a shade of blue that recalled the house on Cape Cod where he’d spent summers as a boy. The sturdy wooden desk, discovered at a local antique shop, reportedly had once belonged to a sea captain whose successful involvement in the Pacific Coast lumber trade of the eighteenth century had made him a very wealthy man. While working, Ben often ran his fingers absentmindedly over the tiny lines scored in neat rows into the desk’s edge, remnants, he liked to believe, of the former owner’s primitive record keeping, an early ledger of trees shipped and monies received, kept before financial success allowed for a proper bookkeeper and account books bound in leather and inscribed in ink.

Everything in the office was connected in some way with the sea. Even the lamp on the desk was in the form of an Art Deco mermaid, her tail curled gracefully about the base while one bronze arm extended up to hold the bulb beneath a shade of blue and green glass. It was the one fantastical element in the otherwise practical space, and Ben sometimes felt the need to apologize when, reaching up to pull the chain to illuminate the bulb, his hand brushed against the mermaid’s bare breasts.