Page 167 of The Professor's Wife

I walked forward, my feet silent against the stone, and the darkness wrapped around me like a second skin. Unlike the other dreams, I was terrified.

I felt watched. There was a darkness I couldn’t outrun. Every step disturbed something old and buried, and images appeared around me in brief flashes before the cave swallowed them again.

Rowe’s eyes.

The day he took his first steps.

June’s proud smile the day she taught me to ride a bicycle.

The first time I kissed a boy.

The moment I realized I was loved.

The day I discovered my life was a lie.

I tried to hold on to each memory, but none remained long enough. They came and disappeared, and I could no longer remember anything else.

Then butterflies began falling from the ceiling. They were loud and heavy, falling like rocks to the ground. They weren’t bright like the others in my former dreams. These were shadowed and translucent. They landed on my shoulders and arms. Their wings skimmed against my skin, so soft I might have imagined them.

With each touch, something inside me dimmed.

It felt like candles being extinguished one at a time. With it, my being began to die off in pieces. Memories, then feeling. I kept walking, but there was an emptiness inside me. I wanted to turn back, but there was nowhere behind me to return to. The cave shifted each time I looked over my shoulder, sealing the path I had already taken. I could only move deeper.

That was when I began looking for Tristan. He was the only thing that existed in my memory. Nothing else survived.

I expected to see him. A glimpse of his form in the darkness. His voice somewhere ahead of me. The sound of his shoes against the stone. His hand appearing and reaching out for mine.

Nothing came.

He wasn’t there.

The realization frightened me more than the cave.

I kept moving until I reached a pool of perfectly still water. It was black, but not dirty. Just so deep, I couldn’t see into it.

I knelt beside it. I expected to see my reflection.

There was nothing.

No face.

No body.

Only the cave above me. The butterflies drifting across the surface. The darkness continuing without interruption where I should have been.

I touched the water.

The surface moved beneath my fingers, but my reflection did not appear. It was as though I had already vanished.

Then I heard it.

A low hum that seemed to rise from beneath the stone. It filled the cave and moved through my body, vibrating inside my bones. It wasn’t a sound I knew, but I understood what it was trying to say.

You are changing.

The butterflies lifted from my skin.

You are shedding.