CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO #3
“He talked about you,” Tristan continued. “Said he was getting the cabin ready for his wife.”
I began to tremble.
He told me what happened after that. How Oliver had made certain the van wouldn’t take him the whole way. How Tristan had continued on foot instead of turning back.
The details moved past me without settling.
All I heard was cabin. All I saw was the long road buried beneath the trees and the building waiting at the end of it.
“By the time I reached the property, it was dark,” Tristan said. “His car was there, but the cabin looked empty. I went around the back and found another shed. Not the woodshed. A smaller one near the trees.”
Spots formed in my vision. I didn’t know how I was still standing. My fingers dug further into the dresser. Tristan remained on the edge of the bed, staring at me, but not entirely. His eyes were distant. He was back there. And I was right there with him.
The lesson room opened inside me. All that damn wood and musk. The kerosene. The unlit lanterns. The old paper. The stale mattress that never properly dried.
“There was a chain bolted into the fucking floor,” Tristan pushed out, voice tight.
I stared somewhere beyond him, no longer breathing. I became the dresser and the bed and the ceiling and the walls—
“Cuffs… A mattress… Books.”
His voice seemed farther away now, reaching me through the gaps between those wooden boards. I was in the lesson room, alone, breaking apart as the light slowly died beside me.
“Papers… Writing in the margins.”
My hands lost their feeling.
“Your name was there.”
I didn’t acknowledge him. I didn’t need to, either.
Mentally, I was gone. Separated from him and still trapped inside that room.
I may have left that lesson room physically, but it had never left me.
It remained inside my body, dark and damp and waiting to take over the parts of me I’d hidden from it.
Oliver’s voice had embedded itself into the walls.
The chain shifted every time I moved too quickly.
I could still hear it clinking. I looked down at my legs to make sure there was nothing there—
Tristan said my name. I couldn’t answer.
“While I was still inside the shed, Oliver came out of the woods.”
The lesson room remained around me. And now, Tristan was inside it. In the dark as I lay bound there, pleading for him to leave.
“He was carrying a shovel,” Tristan said. “Wet dirt all over the blade.”
As he spoke, I saw it clearly. Oliver went back to the cabin as Tristan fled the lesson room to watch him through the kitchen window. I found myself standing beside him, tears threatening to fall as I begged him to stop—to not look in.
“He washed the shovel in the sink.”
I could see the red streaks falling off the shovel. They washed down the drain. Gone. Like all of Oliver’s crimes.
“I thought I saw a woman standing behind him.”
I stilled. That reached me. I blinked out of the moment, my gaze finding Tristan’s. He looked haunted.
“She was thin,” he said. “Standing near the hallway. I couldn’t see her face. Then I looked again, and she was gone. I…I don’t know if she was really there. She wasn’t. I don’t…I don’t know.”
His uncertainty made the air colder.
“Oliver came outside after that,” Tristan continued.
“He knew someone had been near the window. Then he started walking toward the shed. I thought there might actually be a woman inside the cabin. That maybe she’d moved when Oliver looked toward the window.
” He dragged a hand through his dirty hair.
“So, when he went to the shed, I went inside.”
His face dropped. Confusion spread across his features.
“There was no woman,” he said. “Only a coat. No woman...”
He looked over my face before continuing.
“There was a white nightgown laid across a bed.”
My stomach dropped.
Oliver had told Tristan he was preparing the cabin for his wife. Had the nightgown been waiting for me? Had he decided he was taking me back there? Or had he only said wife because it was the explanation he wanted Tristan to hear? Or had the nightgown been waiting for someone else?
The lesson room had always existed inside my memories with only Oliver and me in it.
Sometimes Rowe’s ghost. Sometimes June’s voice.
But now Tristan had gone in there, and I couldn’t help the terror that formed in the pit of my stomach.
There was something about that fucking room.
It was like tar. It got on you—into you—
“I got out before he came back,” Tristan said. “He knew someone had been on the property, though. I couldn’t use the road while he was looking.”
That explained the mud. The torn clothes. The bruising darkening along his cheek and ribs.
“I stayed in the woods. I had to move fast. He…He was following me. I don’t know for how long. I tried cutting down an embankment to get farther from him and lost my footing.”
I looked him over again, understanding why he was hurt.
“I waited until the road had been quiet for a few hours. Then I started walking back.”
I stared at him, wordless.
Oliver could have found him.
The thought should have pulled me fully into the hotel room, but part of me remained in the shed, listening to the chain move across the floor.
Tristan crushed the cigarette into the ashtray.
“I’m sorry, Daze.”
I watched his hand move.
“For what?” I asked in a tiny voice.
“For going in there.” His voice roughened. “I’m sorry…I’m fucking sorry you were in there.”
My eyes ached. I looked toward the hotel door. The moment was instinctual. A way of telling myself there was a way out of this. This room was not the lesson room. I just needed to know it was there. But Tristan noticed and stood.
He watched me for a moment and then he moved away from me, placing the bed between us and leaving the path to the door completely clear. He remained behind the bed, his scraped hands loose at his sides.
“There’s something else,” he said, cautiously.
I looked at him. Felt the hesitation in him as he considered his next words. His voice was low, uncertain.
“I’ve been having these dreams…All my life. In them…In them I see a woman.”
His face paled as he looked down at the ground once more, his fingers flexing nervously.
“When I was young, the dreams were broken up. They weren’t chronological.
Just flashing images of things that didn’t make sense.
The woman…she always had her back turned to me.
And even when she turned, I…I never saw her face properly.
But I knew how she was feeling. I knew when she was happy.
When she wasn’t alone, even if I couldn’t see anyone else. ”
His voice grew quieter.
“Then… Then she was never happy. Then she was always alone. Then she was always sad. And sometimes… I’d watch her holding a cold little hand. She was terrified of letting go.”
My voice was barely audible. “What else?”
“Then…it became the same dream, over and over again. She was somewhere dark. Trapped. I was trying to get to her, but she couldn’t hear me.”
I went rigid as Rowe’s voice raced through my memory.
I had a dream.
I pressed one hand against the wall beside the dresser. The air left my lungs.
You were trapped.
I was trapped where?
It was a dark place, and I kept telling you to get out, but you wouldn’t listen.
My vision darkened around the edges.
Tristan took one instinctive step toward me, and I shook my head quickly. He stopped, but he continued to stare at me.
“Daisy,” he said quietly. “It was you. In my dreams.”
My breaths came out harder.
“I’ve spent years waking up with this feeling that I was supposed to protect someone and didn’t.
Like I got there too late or made the wrong choice.
Like I walked away when I should’ve stayed.
I thought it was about my dad. When he died, those feelings made sense for a while.
Maybe I’d known he was going to die, and I’d regret putting distance between us.
I thought the woman in my dream wasn’t real. ”
His voice nearly choked when he said, “Then I saw you.”
My trembles intensified.
“I didn’t remember your face,” he continued. “I didn’t remember that cabin or that shed. I just recognized the feeling.” His throat moved. “The feeling that I’d failed you before.”
The words tore out of him. He looked as frightened as I felt.
“I don’t know if the dreams are warnings.
Memories. Or my head feeding me bullshit.
I don’t know why I looked at you and felt like I’d been searching for you.
I know how it fucking sounds. I know, Daze.
But…it’s the fucking truth.” He leaned over, staring intently at me now as he said, “And that song? The one you asked me about the night I sang at the restaurant? I was singing about her—that fucking woman. I was singing about you.”
Silence flooded the room. For several seconds, neither of us moved. I couldn’t speak or process.
Then Tristan reached slowly toward the pocket of his jeans.
He pulled something out, folded into a small square.
Dirt darkened one corner, and the creases looked fragile from having been folded and unfolded before.
Tristan didn’t bring it to me. He crossed to the small table beside the balcony and placed it there.
Slowly, he unfolded it and smoothed the paper flat with his scraped palm.
“I found this in that fucking shed.”
He stepped away.
My legs felt detached from me as I approached the table. I recognized the handwriting before I read a single word.
Thin and faint in places. Shakier than my handwriting should have been, as though the pencil had kept slipping between fingers that couldn’t hold it properly.
Never forget Rowe.
My breath caught.
Rowe is still here.
Rowe still lives in your memory.
Rowe and June.
And you are still here.
You are still Daisy.
We are Daisy—
The sentence ended abruptly.
I didn’t remember writing it.