Page 270 of The Professor's Wife

That was the dark. The window distorted things. My own reflection was broken across the glass. Whatever was still dirtyin my blood from the water bottle still affected me. The shed had done things to my mind.

My breath fogged the glass as I peered closer.

Oliver’s hand stopped.

Slowly, his head began to turn in my direction.

I dropped beneath the window so fast my knees hit the dirt. For half a second, I stayed there like an idiot, frozen under the very place he would look first.

Then sense came back.

Move.

I crawled sideways through the wet grass, keeping low against the cabin wall. My shoulder scraped the siding. A branch clawed at my hair. I didn’t stop. I slipped behind a stack of split cedar near the corner of the porch and pressed myself into the dark gap between the woodpile and the wall.

The kitchen light went out. The darkness that followed felt loud. I didn’t move, not even as the back door suddenly opened softly.

Oliver stepped outside.

From where I crouched, I could see only part of him through the stacked wood. His sleeve. One hand lazily clutching the shovel. The pale line of his throat when he turned his head toward the window.

He stood there, listening.

He moved toward the place where I had been crouched seconds before. My stomach clenched hard as he stopped beneath the kitchen window and looked at the glass.

Was the fog of my breath still visible?

He stared for a moment, and then his gaze lowered to the mud.

I pressed myself harder into the woodpile, splinters biting through my shirt.

He knew. He fucking knew. Maybe not that it was me. But he knew someone had been there.

For a long moment, he didn’t move. Then he turned away from the cabin and looked across the yard where the shed was.

I tensed.

I hadn’t closed the shed door the whole way. The small gap of black where there should have been none might be visible to him. He’d know.

Oliver stepped off the path. I pressed myself deeper into the gap behind the woodpile. I winced as a splinter dug through my shirt and into my shoulder.

He crossed the grass.

The yard felt too open and pale under the moon. My gaze refocused on the back door he’d left open behind him. Only a few inches.

Inside, there had been a woman.

Or a coat.

Or nothing at all.

My mind had already decided it was nothing because nothing made more sense. Nothing meant I could get the fuck out of this place. Nothing meant I had not watched some thin, silent shape stand behind Oliver while he rinsed red-brown water down the sink.

But what if it wasn’t nothing?

What if someone was inside? What if she had moved the second I leaned closer? What if she had slipped into the hallway, silent and terrified, because Oliver had looked toward the window? I thought of Daisy here, locked in a room, sleeping on a stained mattress while she scribbled notes to herself.

The thought sank its teeth into me.