CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
I stared at myself in the mirror. The lipstick was raised to my face, but I had yet to add another coat of blood-red color to my lips. Oliver wanted them to look vibrant.
Yes, that was the word he used.
Vibrant.
He said red was a color that drew a man’s attention. I didn’t want a man’s attention. I didn’t want any attention. I would exist blissfully in this world if I never caught the attention of another man again.
Instead of adding another coat, I grabbed a paper towel from the dispenser and ran it along my lips, removing the color altogether. Oliver was so engrossed in his colleagues that I doubted he’d notice, and even if he did, he was in too good a mood to care.
Earlier that week, when Detective Sloan had come around to talk about Lucy, Oliver had appeared charming and talkative, but I knew what the detective didn’t.
Oliver was flustered and disorganized. He tapped a finger against his leg throughout the conversation.
He also kept his arm around me the entire time, looking to me often to carry it.
I did a good job because when Sloan asked about the night Lucy disappeared, I backed him up.
I closed my eyes tightly at the memory.
Oliver had said, “I came home around nine. Daisy had waited for me.”
He’d never even asked me to lie about that. He just threw me into it at that very moment and smiled at me.
I smiled back, nodding. “It was worth the wait.”
As far as I knew, Oliver wasn’t on the man’s radar. Sloan had only come to ask if Lucy had shown up to class the day before and whether she had seemed normal.
Oliver stated that she had.
He never mentioned that he had an appointment with her the day she disappeared—or that I suspected it had sent him running from the house in such a panic.
I had covered for him.
I could have told the detective everything, but it wasn’t as though Oliver would have been thrown in jail that very instant. I held back.
I was weak and pathetic.
I…I should have said something.
“Any reason you’ve got so many cameras?” Sloan asked after we’d wrapped up and were walking him out.
“I have money in the house,” Oliver replied easily. “I also have cleaners who come around, and the cameras make my wife feel safe.”
Then Oliver stopped and stared at the detective for one long moment.
“Why do you ask, Detective?”
Sloan had been smiling, but it began to fade beneath the sudden tension Oliver was exuding.
“Cameras are a good thing, Mr. Black. If more people had them, we might be able to solve more crimes around here. I agree with the safety aspect of it, as well. It’s a big house, and the downtown area isn’t always pleasant. ”
Sloan looked back at me, and his smile stretched again. He was charming, his eyes glowing when he said, “It’s been a pleasure meeting you, Mrs. Black.”
“They’re turned on when I’m out of the house,” Oliver said, that bite still present in his tone. “She doesn’t need protection when I’m here with her.”
Sloan looked back at Oliver, his brows drawing together in thought. “I’m sure you do a good job of that, too. Any footage of the day in question, by the way?”
When Oliver didn’t answer straightaway, Sloan added, “Just out of curiosity. It’s not necessary in the meantime.”
Oliver’s mask nearly slipped.
I saw the void in his eyes. That empty, demonic look buried only a layer beneath his skin.
Then he smiled brilliantly.
“Nothing in the last several weeks. I’ve been having trouble with the Wi-Fi ever since I changed providers. The cameras run, but they don’t record.”
Sloan nodded before pointedly saying, “Better get them fixed so you don’t have to worry about your money and your cleaners and…your wife.”
I hid my smile, aware that I wasn’t the only person who had noticed I appeared to be far down Oliver’s list of priorities.
Ironically, it was the opposite.
This was a man who didn’t make me safe when he was around. We certainly didn’t have cleaners, and he didn’t keep cash in the house because, even though he had made it abundantly clear he would find me and kill me if I ever left him, he was evidently still paranoid that I’d steal some and flee.
He wasn’t wrong.
Anyway, Sloan left, and we hadn’t heard from him since.
I had hoped we would. That Sloan had sensed the evil he was standing in the midst of.
Over the following days, Oliver said the police had set their sights on an ex-boyfriend of Lucy’s. Apparently, they had fought publicly, and it had been ugly.
The story made me second-guess Oliver’s involvement.
I didn’t know a single thing about her disappearance beyond what he told me. I was locked out of the internet and had no phone. Oliver was the only direct line between me and the outside world.
Louise didn’t count because I had always known he might be listening to every word.
Except…
He hadn’t reacted to our conversation in the kitchen.
Either he hadn’t heard it, or he was waiting.
Still, I had begun to suspect that he really had switched off the camera recordings. He wouldn’t want evidence of himself coming and going at all hours, which he continued to do from time to time.
It didn’t mean he wasn’t keeping an eye on me, though. I still had to be careful, and I was.
I had nothing better to do with my time, but he wasn’t solely focused on me anymore.
I placed the lipstick into my clutch and stepped out of the women’s bathroom.
I paused at the threshold of the dining area in the lavish oceanfront restaurant and watched Oliver mingle with his faculty companions. He was in the middle of an animated conversation.
Or, rather, he was in the middle of a long story, and they were watching him, bewitched by his words. I bet they hadn’t even touched their wine, they were so immersed in whatever horseshit he was spewing.
They didn’t know that only weeks ago, he had been in a panic. That he had come home one night disheveled and filthy. That every day he stopped those cameras from recording, he was testing me to see whether I would flee.
He had wanted me to fail, but when I didn’t, Oliver looked at me with such surprise that it was almost as though he didn’t know what to do with me.
The first time he came home to a freshly cooked meal and found me standing by the staircase, pleased to see him, something monumental happened inside him.
In his eyes, he had achieved his ultimate goal.
He had carved the perfect wife out of a broken young woman full of holes, sins, and faults.
Hooray for him.
At least I didn’t have his sporadic mood swings to endure.
I wondered if I’d cracked it, then. If, in a way, I had finally molded my professor in return, allowing him to lower his guard.
He had spent years controlling my every move. Now he no longer believed that much effort was necessary.
He believed I thought him omniscient.
In a way, I did.
He was always, and would always be, one step ahead of me.
I looked at the empty spot next to him, where I should have been sitting. Then I heaved a sigh and glanced at the clock on the wall.
It was only seven.
We were going to be here for a while, and I was going to sit there the entire time with a tight smile on my face as they talked about philosophy and their big houses and their trips around the world.
I would laugh on cue even when I didn’t find their jokes funny. I would provide my brief statement about how philosophy had helped shape our world.
I would feel Oliver’s eyes on me the entire time, and if I performed correctly, he would give me that smile.
The one that told me I wasn’t going to eat a pill and wake up chained in a cabin shed with the Classic Philosophers textbook open before me.
Seneca.
Plato.
Socrates.
And Nietzsche, whose work I enjoyed immensely because he challenged conventional principles and truth itself.
Nietzsche always got under Oliver’s skin. He was the one philosopher Oliver couldn’t crack or bond with.
“I don’t understand how anyone can find comfort in chaos,” he’d growled once. “Nietzsche talks like rules are cages, but without them, what are we? Just animals clawing for meaning in the dark. Such pretentious nihilism.”
He was the one philosopher I could have consumed if Oliver had left more of his work around.
The restaurant was loud, the smell of cooked spices and chargrilled meat heavy in the air. A brief breeze moved through the open patio doors.
I watched a group of women step outside. Their companion had waved them over and looked excited about something.
I moved toward them, curious about what had caught their attention, but mostly because I wanted to take a clear breath.
Away from Oliver and that table.
He was so immersed in those people that I could have a few minutes to myself, and he wouldn’t even notice.
I stepped outside, and the noise of the restaurant immediately fell away, replaced by a man singing.
At first, his voice was only background noise as I looked around, absorbing the moment and pretending I had come here alone.
I felt lightheaded at the thought.
At that small taste of freedom.
Brief and insatiable.
A moment’s peace I had not felt in so long that I had forgotten the feeling altogether.
The summer evening lingered over the water, burnt orange thinning into a deep ocean blue. The harbor was nearly still. In the distance, a small sailboat drifted toward shore, its sails barely moving.
Behind me, the man’s voice rose—low, aching, unmistakably raw.
He was singing his own rendition of Jeff Buckley’s “Forget Her,” lingering over the parts about trying to let go of someone who had carved herself too deeply into him. Even without listening closely to the words, the grief in his voice was unmistakable.
My heart stuttered at the emotion bleeding out of him.
Curious, I turned.
He sat on a simple chair, his eyes closed, singing into a microphone as though the world around him had dissolved.
His face was expressive and pained. Like a sad painting set against the endless ocean.
There was no warmth in the way he sang. Only hollowed-out longing and the anger of a man trying to convince himself he had finally moved on.
No wonder no one uttered a word.