Page 286 of The Professor's Wife

The world went on as usual beyond the balcony. Cars sped up and down the street. Horns blared. Drivers cursed. Pedestrians shouted back. Somewhere nearby, an ice-cream truck turned into the park, its bright little song floating through the morning, no doubt attracting its next flock of children. Girls like June. Boys like Rowe.

I lowered myself into the chair beside him.

He didn’t turn toward me.

I licked my dry lips.

“The cold hand was my son’s.”

Tristan went completely still.

“He died.” The words stuck like glue in my throat. “He had a dream about me too. It was the same as yours.”

I couldn’t elaborate, even if I tried. The pain was all-encompassing. I clasped my shaking hands together and tried to breathe. Tried to look out at the ocean and find some peace there, somewhere, in all that blue.

“I can’t have him back,” I choked out, tears rushing out of me. “I want him back. I want to wake up from this dream, same as you, but I don’t feel like it’s possible. I feel like I’m wading deeper into this prison I’m in. The deeper I get, the harder it is to get out. And Oliver?”

His name changed the air between us. Tristan’s face darkened.

“He owns me,” I whispered. “He controls me. He will never let me go.”

Oliver flashed through my vision.

His cold smile.

His dead face.

Tristan remained silent. I didn’t even hear him breathe.

It didn’t matter if he was listening to me.

I was listening to me.

I was hearing myself admit the words I couldn’t before.

The truth in all its ugly glory.

“I’ve been scared,” I whispered. “I’ve been scared my whole life. How do I overcome that? How do I become strong and stop feeling this fear?”

“Who said fear doesn’t make you strong?” he whispered back, his voice strained.

“It holds me back.”

“What if you used it to break free?”

My body tightened. That strange feeling moved through me, the one that told me this moment was stranger than fiction.

I looked at Tristan.

He was already staring back at me.

His eyes made my heart jump in their intensity, but it wasn’t the intensity I was used to from him. This wasn’t hunger but need that ran so deep, you could look down but never see the ending.

“What is this, Tristan?” I asked, and I genuinely wanted to know. How was it that in four days, I was ensnared by a man I didn’t really know? And yet…I felt like I did. Like we clicked. Like the second our eyes found each other, they knew, on some level, that they were meant to be staring into each other?

“Sometimes I think life keeps bringing us back to the same door until we stop choosing the one that ruins us.”

I watched the side of his face, the bruise forming near his cheek, the dirt still caught in his hair.