Page 281 of The Professor's Wife

Then he asked, “Do you think rooms remember things?”

Cold moved through me.

I frowned. “What?”

“Rooms. Houses. Places where people have been hurt.” He rubbed his thumb over the torn skin of his palm. “Do you think they hold onto it somehow?”

The hotel room seemed to close in around us.

I thought of Oliver’s office. The lesson room. The house.

“Why are you asking me that?”

Tristan lowered the cigarette.

“I followed him.”

Those three words made me almost double over. My heart struck hard against my ribs. Then again. It began thundering so violently that the sound filled my ears. I slid out of bed, dragging my dress down as my feet touched the carpet. I could hardly stand straight.

I moved away until the dresser pressed into my hip.

“You followed Oliver.”

“Yeah.”

I already knew where. My stomach twisted as I whispered, “The cabin.”

It wasn’t a question. Tristan nodded anyway.

My fingers curled around the edge of the dresser. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I waited.

“I think he knew I was following him,” Tristan said, emptily. “We had breakfast together.”

Now I really did feel sick. The thought of them seated across from each other made me weak. Images raced through me. Oliver studying him. Smiling at him. Speaking as though nothing about the moment was unusual.

“He talked about you,” Tristan continued. “Said he was getting the cabin ready for his wife.”

I began to tremble.

He told me what happened after that. How Oliver had made certain the van wouldn’t take him the whole way. How Tristan had continued on foot instead of turning back.

The details moved past me without settling.

All I heard was cabin. All I saw was the long road buried beneath the trees and the building waiting at the end of it.

“By the time I reached the property, it was dark,” Tristan said. “His car was there, but the cabin looked empty. I went around the back and found another shed. Not the woodshed. A smaller one near the trees.”

Spots formed in my vision. I didn’t know how I was still standing. My fingers dug further into the dresser. Tristan remained on the edge of the bed, staring at me, but not entirely. His eyes were distant. He was back there. And I was right there with him.

The lesson room opened inside me. All that damn wood and musk. The kerosene. The unlit lanterns. The old paper. The stale mattress that never properly dried.

“There was a chain bolted into the fucking floor,” Tristan pushed out, voice tight.

I stared somewhere beyond him, no longer breathing. I became the dresser and the bed and the ceiling and the walls—

“Cuffs… A mattress… Books.”

His voice seemed farther away now, reaching me through the gaps between those wooden boards. I was in the lesson room, alone, breaking apart as the light slowly died beside me.