Page 151 of The Professor's Wife

Prisoners chained in darkness, watching shadows on a wall and believing those shadows were real.

I stopped reading.

Through the window, I could see the shed.

Oliver stood behind me, one hand resting lightly on the back of my chair.

Eyes, eyes, everywhere.

“Do you see?” he asked softly. “Do you understand now?”

I looked down at the prisoners on the page.

“Yes,” I said. “I see.”

I saw the shed.

The books.

The chain he had removed from my ankle and the one he was trying to place inside my mind.

My lessons had only just begun.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Notes from the dark:

Everything I believed in was a lie. I am wretched. I am broken. And yet Socrates keeps whispering in my mind. He tells me the soul has lived many lives. That memory does not belong only to this one.

If that is true, perhaps love remembers what the mind cannot. Perhaps my sister is somewhere beyond this life, and some part of her still knows me. If I’m still enough in the darkness, if I give every thought to her, will she sense me the way I long to sense her?

Everywhere I turned, I saw something that would have once made me turn the other way.

A child crying for her mama while the woman searched through an overfilled purse for her wallet at the checkout. Exasperated workers behind the counter, trying to keep their voices pleasant while people complained about stupid shit. Uncaring drivers on the road who leaned on their horns as though everyone else had nowhere important to be.

And then, every now and then, I saw something that made my breath catch and my heart beat faster.

A woman shrinking beside her man.

The fake face. The fake smile and dead eyes. I caught the fear, the small words, the nods.

It was always the nods that got me because sometimes a jerk of the head was safer than saying something wrong.

I could see it all now.

The signs.

The men.

I could tell which ones unsettled me the most. It wasn’t always the loud ones. Sometimes it was the man who stared longer than everyone else but did it in a way that looked distant and empty.

Like he had already decided the person in front of him was wrong.

We had stopped in another small town for lunch. Tristan found a diner off the main road, and we slid into a booth near the window. He sat across from me, pushing fries around his plate while I watched the room.

He hadn’t sung in days.

Not since the tourists in the last town stared at me. He hadn’t questioned me again, but something had changed. He kept us moving and kept me close. He watched doors and windows now, though I wasn’t sure he realized he was doing it.