Page 91 of The Professor's Wife

I shakily stood and walked up and down the aisles, my fingers brushing along the spines of used books. Classic books.

I paused in the philosophy section, my blurry vision latching onto familiar names.

Philosophers who awed me.

Who haunted me.

Aristotle.

Plato.

Seneca—

My stomach lurched.

Nononono, don’t go there.

Unable to resist, I pulled a copy of Seneca from the shelf and opened its weathered pages. My body shuddered at the familiar text staring back at me.

Oh, God.

I was back there again.

In a past full of rich colors. The smiles and the happiness and the beauty I destroyed.

Dizzy, I fell to the floor, an agonized sound escaping my mouth as I frantically grabbed at the pages and tore, andtore,andtore.

It felt like a blackout moment.

A blink, and I was sitting among hundreds of torn pages, Seneca’s words cut in half and destroyed by my shaking hands. My ramblings were those of a nonsensical woman with a fractured mind.

Noise came from all around me.

Familiar arms wrapped around me, pulling me upright.

“We gotta go,” Tristan said tightly. “Sweetness, they want you out.”

It was like being pulled from water. Sounds cleared around me as I blinked and looked around, catching the horrified expressions of customers and workers. One angry woman wasadmonishing us, ordering me to leave or she would call the police.

“Over a used book,” Tristan responded dryly. “I left you money on the counter. Chill the fuck out.”

Tristan didn’t have to drag me out. I stumbled willingly, held upright by his grip. I didn’t realize I’d been crying until I tasted the salt in my mouth. I was still mumbling nonsense. Words from that damn book. Verses that felt like hands wrapped tightly around my throat, squeezing, squeezing—

“Look what you’ve done, Daisy.”

I groaned at the memory.

His voice was so loud in my ears.

Tristan placed me in the van, and I went willingly, shaking everywhere. I clenched my fists tightly, unable to revisit those memories.

The grief.

The fucking grief—

Something crinkled in my hand.

I looked down and uncurled my fingers from around the random page I’d torn out and crumpled. As Tristan hurried around the van, I smoothed the paper out and looked blearily down at the words, my breath trapped in my lungs.