Page 142 of The Professor's Wife

“Oliver, please!”

But he left.

The lock snapped shut behind him.

The next stretch of time blurred into pain.

My head pounded. I whimpered without meaning to. My own body betrayed me with its weakness. The hunger, the thirst, the suffocating dark—eventually, it all drove me to it.

The book.

I turned on the oil lamp and picked it up with shaking hands.

Seneca.

Nero’s teacher.

Even without knowing much about philosophy, I knew enough about the infamous Roman emperor who had supposedly fiddled while Rome burned.

Seneca’s letters stared back at me in ancient, cold print.

I wanted to fling the book across the room, but one lamp was already dead, and the one beside me would eventually dwindle. The darkness would swallow me whole.

My hands trembled as I forced myself to read the words of a dead philosopher.

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it.”

I hated the words.

My vision blurred with tears, but I read them again and again because what else could I do?

I read his reflections on anger. On the pointlessness of wealth. On the chains men built for themselves. I went over the same passages until they were etched into my skull.

Was that Oliver’s goal?

To carve Seneca into me until I could no longer hear my own thoughts?

When the door opened again, I barely stirred.

I didn’t shout.

The lamp beside me had burned so low that I had curled against it for the last traces of light. My body felt brittle, my mind hollowed out.

Oliver crouched beside me, calm and collected.

“Tell me,” he said. “What have you learned?”

I closed my eyes, too tired to resist and too broken to scream. My lips parted, and the words came out hoarse and automatic.

“Time is not short…but we waste it. We waste too much of it.”

“And anger?” he prompted.

I swallowed, the ache in my throat making me wince.

“Seneca said…he said anger is temporary madness. To give in to it is to surrender all reason.”

“And suffering?”