Page 59 of The Professor's Wife

He was quiet for a moment.

“Maybe he would’ve stopped,” Tristan finally said. “Maybe he would’ve smiled and kept walking. Maybe the ball would’ve rolled onto the tracks five minutes later instead.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No.” His eyes held mine. “But neither do you.”

I hated that answer because it was the truth.

There were endless versions of that afternoon inside my head. In some, I spoke. In others, Robert stopped. In one, the basketball rolled beneath a parked car instead and he spent ages fishing it out before taking the route to the train tracks. I had rewritten those few minutes so many times that the real ones had begun to feel like only one possibility among many.

But there was only one version I had been forced to live with.

I lay there with the breeze moving over my skin, feeling bubbles of joy rise in the pit of my chest. I curled into Tristan, his body solid and warm beside mine. His hand found my waist, and I let it stay there.

“I don’t think I ever learned how to be calm,” I whispered. “But this…”

“What is this?” he asked.

“This is just…being.”

There was that word again.

Being. Existing. They meant the same thing, didn’t they?

Except they no longer felt like empty words. Not here. Not with him beside me. For the first time in years, I could feel myself doing both. Tristan watched me for a long moment. Thenhe leaned in and brushed his lips against mine, kissing me softly. He wasn’t trying to turn that moment into something sexual. He was simply there, sharing it with me.

Before we left the stream, I asked Tristan for his knife.

He handed it to me without asking what I intended to do.

I found a tree near the water where the bark was smooth enough to mark. Slowly, carefully, I carvedROBERTinto the trunk. Beneath his name, I scratched a crooked circle with curved lines running through it.

A basketball.

Tristan stood several feet behind me and said nothing.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

NOTES FROM THE DARK:

The soul knows what the eyes cannot see.

Reality is deeper than appearances.

“I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” by The Proclaimers blared through the van as we zoomed down the road with the windows open and the wind whipping through my hair. I grinned, feeling a lightness in my chest as the mountains rose around us beneath a beautiful, clear sky.

Tristan beat his hands against the steering wheel, singing every lyric at the top of his lungs. Every time the chorus came around, he pretended there was a microphone in front of my mouth. I sang, but not as confidently as he did.

“What was that?” he criticized. “Louder, Daze!”

So I sang louder, until my lungs sort of hurt, and he loved it because he grinned at me in that heart-stopping way of his.

I couldn’t sing half as well as he could. The man had a set of lungs on him that left me breathless.

“Why don’t you sing professionally?” I asked once the song ended.

“I don’t want to be a singer,” he answered. “Fuck that.”