Page 294 of The Professor's Wife

I felt good.

Everything shimmered with beautiful clarity: the leaves, the sky, the way the light hit the pavement. It felt like the butterfly had brushed something loose in me. Now everything was bright and pretty.

I was in the nursing program now. That still felt surreal. After everything, after the years of drifting, doubting, restarting, I was finally here, doing what I had dreamed of. It was hard, exhausting, wonderful.

And Tristan.

God, Tristan.

We lived in his house, but it wasn’t only his anymore. Somehow, without either of us announcing it, it had become ours. The walls held our laughter, our arguments, our quiet mornings and tangled evenings.

Best part was he didn’t have to go to the mines with his specialty. The small town was fifteen minutes from a big one that had everything we both needed. He was a skilled electrician, always smelling faintly of metal and cedar, always knowing how to fix wires and faulty switches. With me, he never tried. He simply stayed when something inside me broke.

I’d struggled the first couple of months. I was always looking over my shoulder. Always expecting Oliver to be there. He was fighting the battle of his life by the sounds of it, but I didn’t want to know. I’d filed for divorce and kept my address tied to a PO box so he couldn’t find me.

“I could have stayed with him,” I said once, a long time ago. I hadn’t been living with Tristan long. I’d been having nightmares for weeks. And when I broke down one morning, the admission slipped out before I could stop it.

The words had been sitting in my chest for years. I’d carried them through the silence of empty rooms, through the ache of Rowe’s absence, through the stillness after June. I’d buried them beneath routines and smiles.

But that morning, with Tristan sitting next to me in bed, his eyes intense and searching, I couldn’t hold them back anymore.

“I think there’s a version of me that would’ve stayed,” I said, voice barely above a whisper.

He didn’t speak, waiting patiently for me to continue.

I looked down at my hands. They were trembling. “With Oliver, I mean. I think I could’ve stayed. I was conditioned to obey. To keep quiet. To make myself small enough to avoid punishment. And when Rowe died…when June was gone…I was so hollow, Tristan. I would’ve taken affection in any form. Even if it was twisted and fucked up. Even if it was wrong.”

He still waited for me to continue, and now I couldn’t stop. Now the words were pouring out of me, painful yet cathartic.

“I used to tell myself he loved me,” I continued. “I knew he wasn’t capable of it—not really. But I was desperate. Desperate enough to believe the illusion. Because if I stayed, if I played the part, I could live a decent life. I could survive. How could I survive out there on my own? How could I get on my feet in a world that had moved on without me?”

I looked up at him then, and the weight of my truth settled between us like a separate entity. “He told me I wouldn’t survive without him. That I was nothing without him. And I…I believed it. It was so easy, too. I couldn’t be a mother, even when I had Rowe. Broke and desperate all the time. To me, Olivermade sense. I believed his words so deeply that leaving felt like stepping off a cliff with no ground beneath me.”

Tristan’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t interrupt.

“I almost chose the illusion,” I said. “I almost let myself slip into it. Because being nothing felt worse than being wrong. But I didn’t let it all the way in. I played the long game. I smiled when I had to. I lied when it kept me safe. But I didn’t let go of the thread. The one that told me there was something else out there. Something better.”

I reached for his hand, and he took it without hesitation.

“That something was you,” I said. “And me. The version of me that could love herself again. That could believe she was worth more than survival. That could believe she was more than what Oliver said she was. I just wish I’d found her sooner, before Rowe…”

Before Rowe died.

Tristan’s thumb brushed over my knuckles, already understanding.

“I’m still scared,” I admitted. “Scared that the version of me who stayed is still somewhere inside of me. Waiting for the right kind of loneliness to wake her up. But I’m choosing this version. The one who left. The one who found purpose in you. In me.”

He leaned forward, forehead resting against mine, and whispered, “You’re not nothing, Daisy. You never were.”

I nodded slowly. “Tell that to the version that stayed, Tristan. What if she’s out there, in some other reality, trapped? What if she’s growing old with him? What would become of her?”

Those questions didn’t have answers. I could tell the thought disturbed him.

It disturbed me too.

But now here I was. Out of Oliver’s clutches while his world disintegrated.

I didn’t follow the news regularly, but the detective had contacted me months ago with what Lucy Collier had uncovered.