CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
One Year Later…
A butterfly settled on the palm of my hand. I stilled, my gaze trapped on it.
Its wings shimmered, soft amber flecked with indigo. Around me, the coffee shop hummed with the usual midday rhythm: steam hissing from the espresso machine, the low murmur of conversation, the clink of mugs meeting tabletops. But all of it faded, dulled beneath the weight of this moment.
The butterfly didn’t move.
Neither did I.
Something changed before I understood what it was. The noise around me dulled, and a strange pressure settled over my skin. My smile remained, but the rest of me went still. Behind me, someone laughed. A barista called out a name. But it all sounded distant.
The butterfly tilted its wings and, just like that, it was gone. Lifted into the air, wings slicing through the stillness, out the door and into the light.
I stared at my empty palm, the warmth of its touch already fading.
Something felt off.
I blinked, stepped forward, and the world resumed its rhythm. The barista handed me my coffee with a smile I barely registered. I murmured thanks and left.
Outside, the air was crisp and fresh. It was early fall and the air was cool. I walked down the familiar path toward the university.
I felt good.
Everything shimmered with beautiful clarity: the leaves, the sky, the way the light hit the pavement. It felt like the butterfly had brushed something loose in me. Now everything was bright and pretty.
I was in the nursing program now. That still felt surreal. After everything, after the years of drifting, doubting, restarting, I was finally here, doing what I had dreamed of. It was hard, exhausting, wonderful.
And Tristan.
God, Tristan.
We lived in his house, but it wasn’t only his anymore. Somehow, without either of us announcing it, it had become ours. The walls held our laughter, our arguments, our quiet mornings and tangled evenings.
Best part was he didn’t have to go to the mines with his specialty.
The small town was fifteen minutes from a big one that had everything we both needed.
He was a skilled electrician, always smelling faintly of metal and cedar, always knowing how to fix wires and faulty switches.
With me, he never tried. He simply stayed when something inside me broke.
I’d struggled the first couple of months. I was always looking over my shoulder. Always expecting Oliver to be there. He was fighting the battle of his life by the sounds of it, but I didn’t want to know. I’d filed for divorce and kept my address tied to a PO box so he couldn’t find me.
“I could have stayed with him,” I said once, a long time ago. I hadn’t been living with Tristan long. I’d been having nightmares for weeks. And when I broke down one morning, the admission slipped out before I could stop it.
The words had been sitting in my chest for years. I’d carried them through the silence of empty rooms, through the ache of Rowe’s absence, through the stillness after June. I’d buried them beneath routines and smiles.
But that morning, with Tristan sitting next to me in bed, his eyes intense and searching, I couldn’t hold them back anymore.
“I think there’s a version of me that would’ve stayed,” I said, voice barely above a whisper.
He didn’t speak, waiting patiently for me to continue.
I looked down at my hands. They were trembling.
“With Oliver, I mean. I think I could’ve stayed.
I was conditioned to obey. To keep quiet.
To make myself small enough to avoid punishment.
And when Rowe died…when June was gone…I was so hollow, Tristan.
I would’ve taken affection in any form. Even if it was twisted and fucked up. Even if it was wrong.”
He still waited for me to continue, and now I couldn’t stop. Now the words were pouring out of me, painful yet cathartic.
“I used to tell myself he loved me,” I continued.
“I knew he wasn’t capable of it—not really.
But I was desperate. Desperate enough to believe the illusion.
Because if I stayed, if I played the part, I could live a decent life.
I could survive. How could I survive out there on my own?
How could I get on my feet in a world that had moved on without me? ”
I looked up at him then, and the weight of my truth settled between us like a separate entity.
“He told me I wouldn’t survive without him.
That I was nothing without him. And I…I believed it.
It was so easy, too. I couldn’t be a mother, even when I had Rowe.
Broke and desperate all the time. To me, Oliver made sense.
I believed his words so deeply that leaving felt like stepping off a cliff with no ground beneath me. ”
Tristan’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t interrupt.
“I almost chose the illusion,” I said. “I almost let myself slip into it. Because being nothing felt worse than being wrong. But I didn’t let it all the way in.
I played the long game. I smiled when I had to.
I lied when it kept me safe. But I didn’t let go of the thread.
The one that told me there was something else out there. Something better.”
I reached for his hand, and he took it without hesitation.
“That something was you,” I said. “And me. The version of me that could love herself again. That could believe she was worth more than survival. That could believe she was more than what Oliver said she was. I just wish I’d found her sooner, before Rowe…”
Before Rowe died.
Tristan’s thumb brushed over my knuckles, already understanding.
“I’m still scared,” I admitted. “Scared that the version of me who stayed is still somewhere inside of me. Waiting for the right kind of loneliness to wake her up. But I’m choosing this version. The one who left. The one who found purpose in you. In me.”
He leaned forward, forehead resting against mine, and whispered, “You’re not nothing, Daisy. You never were.”
I nodded slowly. “Tell that to the version that stayed, Tristan. What if she’s out there, in some other reality, trapped? What if she’s growing old with him? What would become of her?”
Those questions didn’t have answers. I could tell the thought disturbed him.
It disturbed me too.
But now here I was. Out of Oliver’s clutches while his world disintegrated.
I didn’t follow the news regularly, but the detective had contacted me months ago with what Lucy Collier had uncovered.
Oliver had plagiarized passages from his students’ essays and published them under his own name.
Lucy’s sister, Lynne, had been one of those brilliant students before she died by suicide a year before Oliver and I met.
Other vulnerable students had also accused him of stealing their work.
They had gone to the university for help, and the university had chosen Professor Black’s word over theirs.
Some of those students later died.
Lucy believed Oliver was responsible, whether he had driven them to it or done something worse.
She had deliberately plagiarized Oliver’s work in an essay of her own, intending to force him to confront her.
Before she did, she sent a friend everything she had uncovered: the stolen passages, the ignored complaints, the names of the students who had tried to speak out, and what she believed Oliver had done to silence them.
Then Lucy disappeared.
Tristan told the police about the puffer and the university keycard marked B13 that Oliver had thrown away outside the pub.
After he drank from the bottle Oliver gave him and woke hours later, both objects were gone.
Though the police didn’t offer a follow-up, I suspected they had been Lucy’s.
The thought that Oliver had been disposing of whatever she had left behind never stopped haunting me.
Her friend didn’t find the email for months. By the time she did, Oliver’s reputation had already begun unraveling.
The police still hadn’t found Lucy. I wanted to believe that meant she was alive, but something inside me knew better.
Lucy had been a fighter.
I admired her.
Either way, Oliver Black was ruined. He would forever carry the stain of what had been uncovered.
I’d also told the detective about the cabin. That was months ago. I didn’t know how quickly the police moved, but I hoped they would investigate it.
They had to.
I was certain Oliver’s secrets were piled inside those rooms somewhere—
Inside the lesson room out back.
With all those eyes.
I shuddered thinking about it.
Every time I’d been out there, I had never truly felt alone. The ghosts of his past pulsed through that place, trapped and screaming to be discovered.
Please, discover them.
I looked up at the sky and took a long, cleansing breath. The sun warmed my face as I sipped my coffee and thought of the long day of classes ahead of me.
And Tristan…
He’d be home by the time I was done. Probably preparing dinner because he liked to surprise me. Said it made him feel like he was part of my day even when he wasn’t.
I could picture him doing it: sleeves rolled up, music playing low, chopping away while I came home and moved around him, feeling him up. I smiled and continued toward the university, coffee in hand, already imagining him in the kitchen when I returned home.
The memory of the butterfly stayed on my palm long after its warmth was gone.