Page 282 of The Professor's Wife

“Papers… Writing in the margins.”

My hands lost their feeling.

“Your name was there.”

I didn’t acknowledge him. I didn’t need to, either. Mentally, I was gone. Separated from him and still trapped inside that room. I may have left that lesson room physically, but it had never left me. It remained inside my body, dark and damp andwaiting to take over the parts of me I’d hidden from it. Oliver’s voice had embedded itself into the walls. The chain shifted every time I moved too quickly. I could still hear it clinking. I looked down at my legs to make sure there was nothing there—

Tristan said my name. I couldn’t answer.

“While I was still inside the shed, Oliver came out of the woods.”

The lesson room remained around me. And now, Tristan was inside it. In the dark as I lay bound there, pleading for him to leave.

“He was carrying a shovel,” Tristan said. “Wet dirt all over the blade.”

As he spoke, I saw it clearly. Oliver went back to the cabin as Tristan fled the lesson room to watch him through the kitchen window. I found myself standing beside him, tears threatening to fall as I begged him to stop—to not look in.

“He washed the shovel in the sink.”

I could see the red streaks falling off the shovel. They washed down the drain. Gone. Like all of Oliver’s crimes.

“I thought I saw a woman standing behind him.”

I stilled. That reached me. I blinked out of the moment, my gaze finding Tristan’s. He looked haunted.

“She was thin,” he said. “Standing near the hallway. I couldn’t see her face. Then I looked again, and she was gone. I…I don’t know if she was really there. She wasn’t. I don’t…I don’t know.”

His uncertainty made the air colder.

“Oliver came outside after that,” Tristan continued. “He knew someone had been near the window. Then he started walking toward the shed. I thought there might actually be a woman inside the cabin. That maybe she’d moved when Oliver looked toward the window.” He dragged a hand through his dirty hair. “So, when he went to the shed, I went inside.”

His face dropped. Confusion spread across his features.

“There was no woman,” he said. “Only a coat. No woman...”

He looked over my face before continuing.

“There was a white nightgown laid across a bed.”

My stomach dropped.

Oliver had told Tristan he was preparing the cabin for his wife. Had the nightgown been waiting for me? Had he decided he was taking me back there? Or had he only said wife because it was the explanation he wanted Tristan to hear? Or had the nightgown been waiting for someone else?

The lesson room had always existed inside my memories with only Oliver and me in it. Sometimes Rowe’s ghost. Sometimes June’s voice. But now Tristan had gone in there, and I couldn’t help the terror that formed in the pit of my stomach. There was something about that fucking room. It was like tar. It got on you—into you—

“I got out before he came back,” Tristan said. “He knew someone had been on the property, though. I couldn’t use the road while he was looking.”

That explained the mud. The torn clothes. The bruising darkening along his cheek and ribs.

“I stayed in the woods. I had to move fast. He…He was following me. I don’t know for how long. I tried cutting down an embankment to get farther from him and lost my footing.”

I looked him over again, understanding why he was hurt.

“I waited until the road had been quiet for a few hours. Then I started walking back.”

I stared at him, wordless.

Oliver could have found him.