Page 303 of The Professor's Wife

She nods once. “Daisy.”

At once, I want to fall at her feet and weep. I have wanted to hear her voice for so long. Instead, I choke out, “June, I miss you. Please, please, come back.”

I don’t know why it makes sense to me at that moment that she can come back with me. Come back with me where? She’s dead. She’s gone. But right now, standing before her, I feel like we can make this happen. It’s possible.

She seems to know what I’m thinking because she shakes her head. “I had to go, Daisy. I had to give you a chance to get out.”

My face twists with confusion. “I don’t understand.”

She watches me, allowing me a moment to reflect, but all I can remember are her final words to me.

I had a dream. I can make this right.

My heart beats harder as I whisper, “Is this like your dream?”

“My dream was different.” She pauses, thinking. “It showed me a path. One where you had a chance.”

“Chance at what?”

“At stopping him.”

Her eyes remain hard on mine as she delivers the truth I already knew.

“It could have been you.”

The second she says it, I understand. I could have been the one in the ground. It hurts to breathe as I whisper, “Isn’t there a way we can exist together?”

Her smile fades. Her voice carries the same pain as mine. “Not in any path I was shown. If I stayed, I lost you. If you lived,you lost me.” Her eyes soften. “But we had our time together, didn’t we?”

I shake my head, refusing to accept that. “He took you from me.”

“He could have taken you from me too.”

“It was for nothing,” I retort, furious now. “You left, and I’ve lost even more—”

“You’ve changed things,” she cuts in gently. “Each time, you move something. You save something. But not enough to change where it ends.”

“What do I do?”

She steps closer until we’re hardly a foot apart.

“You stop going back to the shadows.”

I don’t understand.

“You trust what you know,” she continues. “You stop running from it. You fight back before he can take the rest of them.”

I think of Rowe and the beautiful man. I think of the weeping girl and the countless faceless figures.

“What about the others?”

“Some are already gone,” June says. “But some are still within reach.”

“June,” I breathe, understanding what she is telling me. “If I don’t do this…”

“Then you lose them all over again.”

“I have to save them.”