Page 275 of The Professor's Wife

June bought chocolate but kept stealing bites from his cone. Worse than that, he kept encouraging her to. I loved their connection, but I liked teasing them about it more.

“You have your own,” I reminded her.

“His tastes better.”

“They came from the same freezer.”

“Yeah, but his has Rowe germs.”

I laughed and then Rowe began laughing too, though he had no idea what was funny. Blue ice cream ran over his fingers. June cleaned him up with a napkin, and when her ice cream dripped, she licked it off her hand.

“That’s disgusting,” I said.

“How could you say that to family?”

“Because it’s gross.”

Rowe held his other hand toward me.

“Mama, you do it from my hand.”

“I absolutely will not.”

He chased me along the waterfront with his sticky hand raised while June encouraged him from behind.

I could still hear our laughter. Oh, my God, we were loud and shameless. The three of us. Ridiculous and silly. Happy without knowing enough to appreciate it. My throat tightened. You don’t know what you have until it’s gone.

I moved away from the ice-cream stand and found an empty bench facing the water.

For a long time, I watched sunlight move across the ocean.

I had possessed a life once.

It had been small and cramped as fuck and exhausting. Rowe’s toys under the coffee table used to drive me nuts. June’sclothes were always mixed with mine in the laundry. We ate cheap meals—fuck, I hated June’s potato and onions, but damn, I’d give anything for it right now.

It had belonged to me. Oliver had convinced me he rescued us from it.

He hadn’t.

He had taken the little life I built and taught me to feel ashamed of it.

I pressed my palms against my eyes.

Tristan might have left.

The thought still hurt, but it no longer felt like the end of the road.

I had money hidden in the laundry room. No identification but I’d have to figure that out along the way. I had Rowe’s pictures and the dragon he had slept with every night. And the alarms were down and Oliver had done something very bad. Maybe he would be more concerned with his troubles than with finding his wife.

I had enough to catch a ferry or a bus. Maybe not enough to disappear forever, but enough to begin.

I didn’t know where I would go.

I didn’t know how I would survive.

But I knew something with sudden, frightening clarity.

I could not walk back into Oliver’s house and continue pretending it was my life. My breathing quickened though as I thought of that lesson room. Of being trapped, chained—