Page 269 of The Professor's Wife

Then Oliver stepped out of the woods. He emerged from the dark, sleeves rolled to his elbows and mud darkening the bottom of his trousers almost to the knee. One side of his shirt clung to him, damp with sweat or rain.

In one hand, low at his side, he carried a shovel. The blade was black with wet soil. He walked to the edge of the gravel path and stopped. Not looking toward the shed or cabin, he just stood there, listening. Then he crossed the yard with the shovel hanging beside his leg. He went up the back steps and let himself into the cabin. The door closed behind him.

I stayed frozen inside the shed, every muscle in my body locked up tight as I waited for movement inside the cabin.

A weak light came on in the kitchen, over the sink. Whatever Oliver was doing, he wasn’t coming back out. I needed to run.To go straight for the trees and push as much distance between myself and this place.

But the light drew my eyes and kept my focus fixed there. I thought of the shovel and mud. The mud. Oliver had come out of the woods looking like a man who had not just gone walking.

When Oliver’s back was to the window, I slipped out of the shed. With the sun long gone, the grass was wet, the air cool. I moved low, keeping close to the darker edge of the property, and made my way back toward the cabin. Each step felt loud. Every branch sounded like a snapped bone around me. My shoulder brushed against a branch, and I stopped, waiting for the kitchen door to open.

But it didn’t. I reached the side of the cabin and crouched beneath the kitchen window. For a moment, I couldn’t make myself look. I took a moment, drawing in calming breaths. Then I rose slowly.

Oliver stood at the sink.

The shovel lay across it.

I frowned at the sight. That alone was enough to make my stomach turn. Who washed a shovel in a kitchen sink? There was a hose coiled neatly near the woodshed. A bucket by the back steps. Half the fucking property was dirt and gravel and wet grass. But there he was, inside that clean kitchen, running water over a shovel like it was a fucking dinner plate.

He washed the handle first in slow, thorough strokes, as though he were cleaning a crystal glass after an expensive meal. Water ran over his hands and into the sink. He turned the shovel over, wiped the handle with a dark cloth, then ran it along the blade. Mud loosened in dark streaks. For a second, the water looked brown. Then reddish-brown. Rust, perhaps. Clay. Hell, maybe it was old leaves?

My mind grasped for every ordinary answer it could find, but none explained why a man would wash fucking clay from a filthy shovel in his pristine kitchen.

Something pale clung near the edge of the blade. Oliver pinched it between two fingers, looked at it for a moment, then rinsed it down the drain.

My throat closed.

There could have been a reason for all this.

There was always a reason, wasn’t there?

A man with a cabin had a shovel. They were prepared and shit. A man with land had dirt, too. And a man with a property in the woods had work to do after dark, apparently, because maybe rich professors liked gardening in the middle of the fucking night.

But then my eyes moved past him.

Someone stood near the far wall.

A woman.

Small…thin.

I couldn’t see her face. I couldn’t see anything clearly except the shape of her, dark against the darker room. She stood near the hallway, half in shadow, her arms hanging at her sides.

My heart stopped so violently it felt like pain.

I leaned closer to the glass.

The shape was gone.

There was only a chair and a hanging coat. I saw the black reflection of the trees behind me.

Oliver kept washing the shovel.

I blinked hard at the dots suddenly swarming my vision.

No.

No, that wasn’t real.