Page 198 of The Professor's Wife

“We’re almost there,” he called over his shoulder. “Promise.”

I wanted to joke that his promises didn’t make the incline any less vertical, but something in his voice kept me moving. Kept me from turning back. Maybe because I was tired of turning back. Tired of running from everything, including myself.

By the time we reached the final stretch, my lungs felt scraped raw. The trail narrowed, then widened, and suddenly the trees fell away. Light opened over us.

I stepped forward.

And there it was.

The lookout stretched wide above the valley. Mountains folded into one another in blue-gray layers. Wind rushed up from below, cool and clean and nothing like the stale air I had lived in for years.

I didn’t speak. I couldn’t. My throat tightened with emotion.

Tristan came up beside me, close enough that I felt the heat of him.

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

“Yeah.” He looked out over the valley. “I come up to places like this when I need to make noise and don’t want anyone asking questions.”

I glanced at him.

He shrugged. “You’ve been swallowing everything since you told me. Thought you might like somewhere big enough to give some of it back.”

My hands tightened. Oliver’s voice moved at the edge of my mind, followed by Rowe’s face at the bus window and June laughing in a kitchen that no longer existed.

“I don’t know how,” I whispered.

Tristan stepped back, giving me the lookout. “Start ugly.”

I looked out at the valley, too wide to care what sound I made. My heart hammered. I thought of Rowe, of June, of the first time Oliver approached me while I studied. The hope he crushed inside me. The fear he instilled deep, leaving me paranoid that he would find me no matter where I was and end me. My throat ached. Something inside me cracked, a seam splitting after years of pressure.

I inhaled deeply.

And then I screamed.

It tore out of me, raw and shaking, pulled from a place so deep I didn’t know it still existed. The sound ripped through the air, carried by the wind, swallowed by the mountains. I screamed again, louder, until my voice broke, until my knees trembled, until the weight I’d been dragging behind me finally loosened.

Tears followed. I screamed until my voice broke, then dropped to my knees and gripped the soil because it was solid and I needed something solid beneath me.

Tristan did not touch me. He stayed several feet away and let me be loud without rushing to soothe me.

When I stopped, the valley gave the sound back in pieces.

After a while, Tristan said, “Better?”

I wiped my face with the heel of my hand. “No.”

He nodded. “Honest, though.”

I exhaled and then took another breath in. The air hurt my throat, but it felt clean.

Oliver had not taken these months from me. Whatever happened next, he could not erase the roads, the music, or the man standing behind me.

It was mine.

The stars shimmered against the black velvet sky, and the thin mountain air was cold enough to make my breath visible. A sliver of moon hung low, casting a pale glow through the tall pines. Crickets chirped in the grass, and somewhere in the dark, an owl called low and long.

We’d wandered far today. It felt like an eerie walk in the dark woods getting back from the lookout. I was relieved when we emerged from the trees slowly. Wrapped in one of his flannel shirts over my spaghetti strap top, my hand brushed against his every few steps. The storm that had raged between us lately was quiet now, replaced by something heated and fragile…yet I felt solid with Tristan.