Page 284 of The Professor's Wife

“I didn’t remember your face,” he continued. “I didn’t remember that cabin or that shed. I just recognized the feeling.” His throat moved. “The feeling that I’d failed you before.”

The words tore out of him. He looked as frightened as I felt.

“I don’t know if the dreams are warnings. Memories. Or my head feeding me bullshit. I don’t know why I looked at you and felt like I’d been searching for you. I know how it fucking sounds. I know, Daze. But…it’s the fucking truth.” He leanedover, staring intently at me now as he said, “And that song? The one you asked me about the night I sang at the restaurant? I was singing about her—that fucking woman. I was singing about you.”

Silence flooded the room. For several seconds, neither of us moved. I couldn’t speak or process.

Then Tristan reached slowly toward the pocket of his jeans. He pulled something out, folded into a small square. Dirt darkened one corner, and the creases looked fragile from having been folded and unfolded before. Tristan didn’t bring it to me. He crossed to the small table beside the balcony and placed it there. Slowly, he unfolded it and smoothed the paper flat with his scraped palm.

“I found this in that fucking shed.”

He stepped away.

My legs felt detached from me as I approached the table. I recognized the handwriting before I read a single word.

Thin and faint in places. Shakier than my handwriting should have been, as though the pencil had kept slipping between fingers that couldn’t hold it properly.

Never forget Rowe.

My breath caught.

Rowe is still here.

Rowe still lives in your memory.

Rowe and June.

And you are still here.

You are still Daisy.

We are Daisy—

The sentence ended abruptly.

I didn’t remember writing it.

There had been times inside that room when Oliver’s voice became louder than my own. Times when hunger and exhaustion hollowed me out until I couldn’t remember whatbelonged to him and what still belonged to me. He’d give me loose paper when I was being good. He wanted answers. But I think he also wanted to torment me. Get me to search for myself—my voice—in the empty sheets of paper he gave me. It was telling when I could hardly write. Because I’d lost my voice, and he knew that.

So, I had written down the things he couldn’t be allowed to take. The things he couldn’t erase from my being.

Rowe.

June.

My name.

Proof that somewhere beneath everything he had taught me to become, I still existed.

“You wrote it,” Tristan said quietly.

I couldn’t answer.

My fingers hovered above the paper, but I didn’t touch it.

It felt like reaching toward the hand of the woman I had been inside that shed.

A young woman still trapped there. Still trying to remember herself.