Page 227 of The Professor's Wife

“I’ll keep the alarms down tomorrow,” he said. “Get ready for ten in the morning. If I don’t make it home by noon, there’s the walk-in clinic on Beauford Street by the shopping center. They’ll take your blood there.”

I pretended to consider it. “But don’t you want to be there when we find out?”

“More than anything, but if you’re suffering, I won’t let my work get in the way of you getting answers.”

It disturbed me how genuine he sounded.

The old me would have wanted to believe him. I might even have convinced myself that he was changing for the better.

But that was stupid, and I didn’t give a fuck even if he did have some small capacity for change.

He might have been a good father to Rowe in the beginning, but he could have easily turned on him the way he had turned on me.

All Oliver wanted was to possess.

People, objects, every corner of his environment—he wanted control over all of it.

A baby would not be someone for him to love. It would be another instrument to use against me. Something that bound me to him through parenthood, through the law, and through the knowledge that a piece of him lived inside me.

The thought truly did make me nauseous.

I felt so ill and trapped by the idea that I hurried from the bed and heaved into the toilet.

I thought of the birth control pills hidden in the laundry room and how grateful I was to have them.

They were saving me from that prison.

But they were also a death wish if he ever discovered they existed.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

Tristan

I knew her.

The moment my eyes found hers, the world shifted—violently, intimately—but no one else felt it. They watched me, unaware, while I watched her. In that instant, the numbness that had wrapped itself around me for so long shattered like glass. The fragments fell inward, piercing through flesh and sinew, revealing something I thought I’d lost: a fucking heart.

Bleeding.

Beating.

Alive.

It thudded with urgency, aching in the most delicate way. And when she turned, that fucking heart dropped.Hard.A visceral pull surged through me, electric and primal. It wasn’t lust. It wasn’t longing. It was something older. Deeper. A fucking hunger that made my legs twitch to move. To chase. To reach her.

I knew her.

I wanted to tell her.

I wanted to say,I know you. I swear it. I do. I’ve been dreaming about you my whole life. I’ve been waiting for you. And now you’re here.

Now, my life has finally begun.

I forced out the rest of the song with my eyes fixed on the doors she’d vanished through. The second it ended, I set the guitar aside and went after her.

But when I chased her down and caught her beside her husband, the light extinguished, replaced with a violent rage.

Not at her.Neverat her.