Page 161 of Wicked Little Secret

THERON

THIS MESS WE’RE IN - THOM YORKE AND PJ HARVEY

I leavethe glass sliding door open for Nyssa to escape. I walk out of the hidden room altogether. And then my office.

Castlebury’s campus slips behind me in the rearview mirror as I drive far away. For once, my mind’s vacant the entire drive home. I’m operating on autopilot until I pull into the driveway of my home and blink out of my stupor.

Atticus pounces on me the moment I step through the door.

My golden companion spins in circles, dying for quality time. It’s no wonder when I’ve been gone since early in the morning. I haven’t been home as often as I usually would be the past few days.

Weeks.

Since Nyssa Oliver entered my life.

Then again, in a morbid sort of way, we’ve always been involved in each other’s lives. Though neither of us were aware of the extent.

I’m still struggling to process the very truth I revealedto her today. Everything she’s ever believed about her existence was a lie. Right down to her birth name.

Twenty years ago, I fell madly in love with Josalyn Webber.

Twenty years later, I’ve fallen madly in love with Rosalyn Vise, her daughter.

It sounds unfathomable thinking about it, even in the plainest of terms.

Yet as my heart aches, the truth rings louder. I have loved and have lost Josalyn Webber, and now I’ve found love again… in her daughter.

I open the kitchen back door and let Atticus run wild. The happy-go-lucky canine is in a mood for zoomies as he speeds out the door and runs circles around the yard.

My gaze is on him, though I’m actually blind to what’s in front of me.

Instead, I’m witnessing the past and future converging. Two Theron Adler’s confront each other, old and new, young and matured, hopelessly in love with the same woman only different. It feels wrong in every sense of the word.

More wrong than Nyssa and I already were, given our age gap. Given my position as her professor and her status as my student.

As if things couldn’t become any more twisted and taboo.

It’s life’s latest cruel joke to deny me the love I desperately sought so many years ago. The home I bought in hopes of a bright, perhaps cliched, future, where the woman I adored married me and I gave her a picturesque life in the suburbs.

The result was a dead paramour who I’ve spent twenty years mourning.

The reality of today is that I’ve now fallen, even deeper, for a woman I never should’ve gone near. The daughter of my dead paramour, without even realizing that was who she was to begin with.

A montage of our time together plays in my head. All the moments I basked in Nyssa’s presence or lurked in the shadows, enjoying every trivial detail about her. She was so special, so unique that it took my breath away.

It made me feel alive. My dead heart beat for the first time in decades.

Atticus barks as he halts in the middle of the grass. It’s begun to drizzle but he wants to play fetch. He’s signaling for me to pick up the tennis ball a few feet away and chuck it so he can chase after it.

I sigh, stepping out from under the patio covering. “You are perhaps the only dog who likes water, Atty.”

I grant his wish, tossing the ball toward the other end of the yard. He races across the wet blades of grass in his desperation to catch the little neon ball. I’d laugh if it didn’t feel like the heart beating inside my chest was being ripped to pieces.

Rationally, I’m aware of what I need to do. I know there’s only one way forward.

The only way I can exist in a world where she does when I can’t have her. The only way I can show the depth of how I’ve come to feel.

Make her understand, as dark and morbid as it may be.

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