Page 168 of The Professor's Wife

The water trembled.

You are becoming—

I woke before I discovered what.

Tristan had been sleeping beside me, his arm stretched across the place where my body had been. His hand rested against the empty sheet as though he had reached for me without waking and found nothing.

I stared out the window until morning. I watched the sky lighten and tried to understand why the dream had shown me a world without my reflection.

Why Tristan had not been inside it.

Why I had shed myself until nothing remained.

Whether I was becoming someone new—or disappearing completely.

Now, with his fingers wrapped around mine, I wondered whether I had been wrong.

Maybe the dream had not shown me that Tristan couldn’t reach me. Maybe it had shown me a place I had not yet allowed him to enter.

CHAPTER FORTY

THE PAST

I had not slept a single second last night.

I paced the halls, the sounds of the floorboards creaking beneath my trembling feet mixed with my unsteady breaths. The old clock on the mantel ticked its steady rhythm, counting down the minutes until dawn.

Until the moment I would have to say goodbye.

Rowe was only eight.

He slept with his small hands curled beneath his chin, a faint whistle in his breath that had soothed me in quieter nights. How many nights had we spent cuddled together, his small frame pressed against mine? I used to feel shame when I co-slept with him, hating my impoverished circumstances—

Now I would do anything to be back there again, in June’s little apartment with Rowe’s toes digging into my spine. At least he was in my arms. At least I knew where he was. It used to be him and me against the world.

Now my world was a convoluted mess that I had no control over.

Oliver had made it clear: Rowe would leave this morning. If I refused, if I defied him—the punishment would be worse than anything he had done before.

I had pleaded for him one last time the day before, and all pleasantries had leached from Oliver’s eyes. He had hissed thethreat to me again. I had seen it in his eyes when he said the words, the way the muscles in his jaw had jumped beneath the shadow of his stubble.

And so I told myself again and again, as I stared out into the dark, that this was the lesser evil. Sending Rowe away meant keeping him beyond Oliver’s reach, at least for a while.

But he was so little.

He needed his mommy.

When the light of morning finally filtered through the cracked curtains, I woke Rowe gently, trying to keep my voice steady. He rubbed his eyes, blinking up at me with that same soft, bewildered gaze he had the day he was born. My heart tightened.

“Mama...do I really have to go?” he asked, his voice catching in his throat.

My breath thinned. I wanted to say no, to gather him into my arms and run with him out the door, into the street, anywhere but here.

But Oliver was in the next room, listening.

And there would be no place safe enough to hide.

“You do, sweetheart,” I whispered, brushing his hair from his forehead. I cleared the lump in my throat and kept the tears back. “You have to go. But it will be an adventure. You’ll learn so many things. And I’ll be right here when you come back.”