Page 173 of The Professor's Wife

Tears rushed to my eyes as I looked up, and Tristan’s gaze met mine. There was something raw in his expression. I wanted to look away, but I didn’t.

“He’s been gone for years, but it still feels like yesterday.”

Tristan blinked slowly, shocked. His lips parted, but no sound came out.

“I lost him,” I said. “I lost him, and I wasn’t strong enough to stop it. I wasn’t fast enough.Braveenough. I wasn’t…enough.”

I felt the tremor in my hands before I saw it. I clenched my fists, trying to steady myself.

“I was supposed to protect him. That’s what mothers do, right? They shield. They fight. They save. But I didn’t. I froze. I panicked. I did…nothing. I…watched him go…”

Tristan reached for me, and I flinched. I didn’t deserve comfort. I needed to punish myself.

“I’m weak,” I whispered. “I’ve always been weak, Tristan. And he paid the price.”

The pine behind us creaked in the wind. A bird called somewhere beyond the trees.

Tristan didn’t offer soothing words. He stayed there and let me say it.

For the first time since Rowe died, I let someone see what I had carried alone.

The weight had grown heavier with every passing year, and all I could think about in that moment was my baby in a little coffin — a life once bright and fierce reduced to bone and ash.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

THE PAST

The house had never been so still.

The stillness seeped into my skin and made my bones feel empty. Nothing moved unless I moved it.

I sat on the edge of Rowe’s bed, the same way I had every morning when I used to wake him gently for school. The bed was still unmade from the last morning I woke him up to get ready. He hadn’t yet learned to make his own bed. I didn’t want to let that responsibility go because it meant confronting his ever-growing independence. I knew I would have budged. Just like when I’d taught him to tie his laces or stir the pancake batter, he would have learned eventually.

I held one of his little sweaters to my chest, the blue one with the faded yellow stripe across the middle. He used to call it his “super sweater,” because he thought he ran faster when he wore it.

I buried my face into it, inhaling deeply, though his scent was fading, slowly stolen by time and grief.

He had been gone two weeks. Two weeks since the shuttle bus veered off-course, the driver too tired, too reckless—or so the reports said. Fourteen days since I’d collapsed to my knees in the hallway. It felt like an eternity.

I couldn’t understand how the world had kept turning while mine shattered.

I didn’t sleep anymore. I didn’t eat, not properly. Everything tasted like ash. When I did manage to close my eyes, it was only to jolt awake minutes later, heart pounding, breath ragged, expecting—no, begging—to find it had all been a dream. That he would be in the kitchen with cereal smeared around his mouth, asking for seconds.

But no matter how many times I screamed into his pillow or gripped the walls to keep from collapsing, the nightmare didn’t end. This was my life now, with the center of it missing.

I blamed Oliver.

Of course I did.

I hated him. I hated him.

I buried my son—held his embalmed body in my arms for so little time—and I couldn’t focus on my grief in that moment. I spent it hating Oliver.

He had pushed for the boarding school. Said Rowe needed discipline, routine, structure. Said it would make a man of him. I remembered my pleas, the late-night tension that filled our bedroom, the way he made me feel ridiculous for wanting to keep Rowe close.

How did I let him have a say to begin with?

Somewhere along the way, so gradually I could not name the moment, I had given this man every ounce of control. He had taken every soft part of me and taught me to distrust it.