Page 191 of The Professor's Wife

He said my name so impersonally. It immediately drove tears to my eyes that I held back. “I ran. I was going to tell you.”

He pushed off the van and walked a few steps, burying his hands in his pockets. He kept his large back to me even as I followed. “You had a lot of fucking time to tell me about it.”

“I’m sorry, Tristan—”

“Don’t apologize after the fucking fact, Daisy,” he growled. “You had a lot of time to come clean. I brought you into my whole fucking world—made you my whole fucking world!”

“Tristan—”

He spun around to look down at me, his pain and anger entwined as he gritted out, “You could have told me I was fucking a married woman!”

I stopped cold in my tracks and nodded. “I could have.”

“Why, Daisy?” he demanded, sharply.

I didn’t answer straight away, and he turned his back once more and shouted, “Fuck!” into the air, punching at it with his fist.

“I didn’t know when I met you that it would turn into this,” I tried to explain, feeling panicked. “I…I put it all behind me and ran. I—I didn’t want to tell you and ruin everything—”

“You ruined it by saying nothing!” he growled, slicing me with his glare. He stepped to me, his anger billowing out of him. “You never fucking talked about anything! Just kept it buried the fuck away, and like an idiot, I kept chipping at your walls—”

“You were getting so close—”

“It doesn’t lessen the fucking blow, Daisy!”

“I know,” I said quickly, nodding my understanding. “I didn’t mean for this to happen, I swear it.”

“Have you been playing me?”

“No!”

“Using me until you’re ready to go back to your husband! Yourprofessor.” He scoffed at the last word like it tasted bitter to him.

My eyes widened. “Never.”

His eyes narrowed on mine. “I don’t know if I believe you.”

“Tristan, please.”

“I need a minute.”

“I’m sorry—”

He cut me off by storming away. I felt onlookers glance our way, and I didn’t care. I wanted to run to him, but I knew it wouldn’t help the situation. I went to the camper and climbedin. I sat down for some time, trying to think of what to do as my heart raced and my panic rose.

I didn’t let the tears fall, but I felt so fucking sad.

For many years I wanted to run when I felt my emotions spiralling. It was my fight or flight mode. I daydreamed about it all the time. My escape from hell. It was what I finally did when everything came to a head with Oliver, and yet now I wondered whether I should have stayed instead and continued with the void instead of all this new grief.

My flight mode wasn’t kicking in, but I knew Tristan was done with me. In his eyes, this was unforgivable. I saw the look of disgust in his eyes. The raw anger. I’d seen it directed at others, but never me, and it left me breathless. I lost so much in that single moment. I’d lost Tristan, and I was certain he would never have stars in his eyes when he looked at me again.

I saw the disbelief in his face and imagined everything he must be thinking: that every kiss and every laugh had been tainted by what I had withheld. He deserved someone free of this. Instead, I had let him fall for me without telling him the past still had its hands around my throat.

I wanted to explain that I had not left because I was brave. I had left because I was drowning, and Tristan had been the first clean breath I had taken in years. None of that changed what I had done to him.

I should have told him.

But I didn’t because I wanted to believe I could start over. That I could be someone unmarked by the past. Someone who didn’t carry the weight of a name that hadn’t felt like mine in years. I didn’t lie to protect myself—I lied because I was terrified that the truth would erase everything we’d built. That he’d look at me and see the woman I used to be, not the one I was trying so desperately to become.