CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO #4
There had been times inside that room when Oliver’s voice became louder than my own.
Times when hunger and exhaustion hollowed me out until I couldn’t remember what belonged to him and what still belonged to me.
He’d give me loose paper when I was being good.
He wanted answers. But I think he also wanted to torment me.
Get me to search for myself—my voice—in the empty sheets of paper he gave me.
It was telling when I could hardly write.
Because I’d lost my voice, and he knew that.
So, I had written down the things he couldn’t be allowed to take. The things he couldn’t erase from my being.
Rowe.
June.
My name.
Proof that somewhere beneath everything he had taught me to become, I still existed.
“You wrote it,” Tristan said quietly.
I couldn’t answer.
My fingers hovered above the paper, but I didn’t touch it.
It felt like reaching toward the hand of the woman I had been inside that shed.
A young woman still trapped there. Still trying to remember herself.
“I couldn’t leave it there,” he said.
My eyes burned.
Oliver might have read it. He might have read every desperate word and laughed at how hard I had fought to preserve pieces of myself.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
Tristan’s face changed, but he didn’t move closer.
I looked down again.
We are Daisy—
Not I.
We.
As though I had already known I would become divided. The woman inside the shed. The wife inside Oliver’s house. The person standing here now, staring at a message from herself that felt as though it had crossed something impossible to reach her.
As I lost myself to these thoughts, Tristan looked toward the balcony. He crossed the room and slid open the glass door. Cool morning air moved through the stale heat.
Before stepping through, he glanced toward the hotel door.
“It’s open, Daze.”
My gaze followed his.
Nothing stood between me and the door of the hotel. Did he think I wanted to flee? That I thought he was stopping me?
“You can leave,” he said. “I won’t stop you. I won’t follow you.”
His voice roughened.
“But please don’t go back to him.”
Then he stepped onto the balcony.
The glass door remained open behind him.
Yes, I could leave. I could reduce him to a crazed, bereft musician who had followed my husband into the place that haunted me—
I stopped those thoughts straightaway. That wasn’t what he was. Not to me.
I stood beside the table and stared at the note.
At Rowe’s name.
June’s.
Mine.
I didn’t know how long I remained there. Long enough for my breathing to settle. I folded the paper carefully along its old creases and held it against my chest.
Then I looked toward the balcony.
From where I stood, I could see Tristan sitting in one of the wicker chairs with his back partly turned to me, one hand pressed against his ribs. He stared out at the ocean.
I crossed the room. Stepped onto the balcony. Looked out.
The world went on as usual beyond the balcony.
Cars sped up and down the street. Horns blared.
Drivers cursed. Pedestrians shouted back.
Somewhere nearby, an ice-cream truck turned into the park, its bright little song floating through the morning, no doubt attracting its next flock of children. Girls like June. Boys like Rowe.
I lowered myself into the chair beside him.
He didn’t turn toward me.
I licked my dry lips.
“The cold hand was my son’s.”
Tristan went completely still.
“He died.” The words stuck like glue in my throat. “He had a dream about me too. It was the same as yours.”
I couldn’t elaborate, even if I tried. The pain was all-encompassing. I clasped my shaking hands together and tried to breathe. Tried to look out at the ocean and find some peace there, somewhere, in all that blue.
“I can’t have him back,” I choked out, tears rushing out of me. “I want him back. I want to wake up from this dream, same as you, but I don’t feel like it’s possible. I feel like I’m wading deeper into this prison I’m in. The deeper I get, the harder it is to get out. And Oliver?”
His name changed the air between us. Tristan’s face darkened.
“He owns me,” I whispered. “He controls me. He will never let me go.”
Oliver flashed through my vision.
His cold smile.
His dead face.
Tristan remained silent. I didn’t even hear him breathe.
It didn’t matter if he was listening to me.
I was listening to me.
I was hearing myself admit the words I couldn’t before.
The truth in all its ugly glory.
“I’ve been scared,” I whispered. “I’ve been scared my whole life. How do I overcome that? How do I become strong and stop feeling this fear?”
“Who said fear doesn’t make you strong?” he whispered back, his voice strained.
“It holds me back.”
“What if you used it to break free?”
My body tightened. That strange feeling moved through me, the one that told me this moment was stranger than fiction.
I looked at Tristan.
He was already staring back at me.
His eyes made my heart jump in their intensity, but it wasn’t the intensity I was used to from him. This wasn’t hunger but need that ran so deep, you could look down but never see the ending.
“What is this, Tristan?” I asked, and I genuinely wanted to know.
How was it that in four days, I was ensnared by a man I didn’t really know?
And yet…I felt like I did. Like we clicked.
Like the second our eyes found each other, they knew, on some level, that they were meant to be staring into each other?
“Sometimes I think life keeps bringing us back to the same door until we stop choosing the one that ruins us.”
I watched the side of his face, the bruise forming near his cheek, the dirt still caught in his hair.
“That sounds horrible,” I whispered.
“Yeah.”
“And hopeful.”
His mouth twitched faintly. “Maybe.”
My throat tightened. I hardly made a sound as I whispered, “I don’t know how to get out of this nightmare.”
His expression softened. After everything he’d just said, after the looks he gave me in the last hour, I couldn’t remember the anger that sometimes seeped out of him. Couldn’t imagine him rageful and violent and bitter.
He was broken. Like me. And lonely. Like I was.
His chest moved with air, but he didn’t look like he had taken a full breath in.
When he spoke, his voice was soft and familiar.
“You leave, Daze. With me.”
“Leave?”
“Now. While you still can.”
My head spun as I looked away. I’d already started that. I had already made an oath that this was my chance, yet my being trembled.
It couldn’t be that easy.
He would find me.
He would kill me.
Adrenaline poured through me until I couldn’t stop shaking.
Then Tristan touched me.
His warm hand wrapped gently around my chin, almost too gently, like he was afraid I would vanish beneath his fingers. He turned me toward him and made my blurry eyes lock onto his.
“Either you run with me,” he whispered, “or you walk back into that nightmare and let him keep destroying you.”
Tears slid down my cheeks. Anguished, I whispered back, “I can’t go back there. Oh, God. I can’t go back there. I can’t.”
He tugged at my arm, and suddenly I was in his lap, cradled in his large arms.
He held me tightly.
He was shaking too.
“Come with me,” he said gruffly. “Please, Daze. I want you. I just want you.”
I nodded, holding him tightly as he rocked me back and forth like a child.
I didn’t stop nodding. Didn’t stop crying.
“Come with me.”
“Yes,” I whispered. “I’ll go.”
His arms tightened around me so fiercely I almost couldn’t breathe.
Then he buried his face against my hair. I closed my eyes and held onto him, and it felt right. It felt like this was where I belonged.
“I have to go home first.”
“No, Daisy.”
“My bag is still there. Rowe’s pictures are there. His dragon. My money. Things I need.”
“We can get new things.”
“Not those. Not Rowe’s dragon.”
His jaw worked, and he looked toward the ocean as if he might find a better answer there.
“Daisy—”
“I am not leaving Rowe behind.”
That stopped him completely. He watched me, searching my face, the understanding of how much this meant to me dawning on him.
He gave a stiff nod. “Five minutes in the house.”
I nodded back. “Five minutes.”