hirty years. I was more than thirty years too late.T
I don’t remember falling asleep. I barely remember walking through Esther’s door. The first rooster’s cry came before the sun crested the mountains, and the sound was so much like home that for a split second, I forgot where I was.
No, when I was.
The bedroom at the northeast corner of the farmhouse was one I’d slept in many nights when Gran was working late on the farm or she had to stay over to keep an eye on morning deliveries. Yet, in the lifetime of this house, this was still the first time I’d woken beneath this roof. The room smelled the same, and in many ways it looked the same, too. It felt as if I was the only thing that was different now, and that was a change that couldn’t be undone.
Susanna is dead.
I’d known it for a long time. There was never a thing in me that felt like she was out there somewhere, waiting for me to find her. But ever since I’d seen that photograph, a part of me had wanted it to be true. The abandoned child tucked away and still living inside of me had seen the words trust me, and I’d let myself believe, in some small way, that I could find her.
And when I did, I would finally understand why she’d left.
I sat up on the edge of the bed, knees drawn into my chest.
My fingers nervously fidgeted with the hem of my jeans as I listened to the sounds of the house. Footsteps had been trailing up and down the hallway for at least an hour, but I hadn’t made a sound. If I opened that door, it wouldn’t be the house I knew. It wouldn’t be the farm I knew. This place was an unknown land, and something told me I wasn’t safe in it.
The breeze tugged at the curtains that framed the open window. Outside, the tractor that sat rusted and hidden by overgrown brambles at the corner of the barn in 2023 was clearly operational. The farm was laid out differently from the one I’d grown up working. From the second floor, I could see that there wasn’t a clear-cut pattern to the plots, and the fields were mostly wild, an old tactic that relied on native species growing between the plants to help with drainage and pests. In 2023 we had modern practices that controlled those things, and even from the road, you could see the orderly layout of the farm.
There were two makeshift greenhouses that no longer existed in my time, replaced by fancy structures with irrigation and aeration systems. These were more like glorified potting sheds where I suspected Esther grew roses. That was one of the things the farm had been known for during this time— year-round roses that you could otherwise get only in New York.
But the thing my eyes kept looking for was the door.
Every time I’d seen it, it had appeared unexpectedly, out of nowhere. And there had been days, weeks, sometimes months in between. But I didn’t have that kind of time. I needed to get out of here. Now.
A familiar scent crept into the air, and I closed my eyes when the burn of tears ignited behind them. Biscuits baking in the oven—a smell I intrinsically associated with home. I let
my feet fall to the floor and stood, making my way to the door.
It opened with a creak, and I came down the narrow wooden stairs to see Esther in the kitchen. Her hair was pinned at the nape of her neck and she wore a fresh, unwrinkled dress beneath her clean apron.
She didn’t look up at me as I timidly stepped out of the hallway. “Did you manage to sleep at all?”
I nodded, the chill in the drafty house making me shiver.
“Good. There’s coffee if you’d like some.”
My eyes went past her, to the percolator on the stove. There was steam pouring from the spout. “Thanks.”
Her gaze followed me as I crossed the kitchen. She was straining something through a cheesecloth in the sink. “Cups are up on the shelf.”
I searched around me until I saw the one she was talking about. A small, crude plank of wood beside the icebox held four mismatched mugs. For my entire life, there had always been a cabinet on that wall.
I reached up, taking the cup nearest to me and holding it to my chest. “Thank you for letting me stay.”
“Eamon didn’t give me much of a choice, did he?” Esther smirked. “But you’re a Farrow, June. This place is as much yours as it is mine, even if you’ve ended up on the wrong end of time.”
The wrong end of time. Is that what this was?
I set the mug down, taking the percolator up from the stove and pouring. When I took a sip, I winced at the bitter taste. I didn’t see a sugar pot anywhere.
Esther hauled the cheesecloth up out of the sink, giving it a shake before she dropped whatever was encased within it into a bowl on the counter.
“I have questions.” I sat down in one of the chairs, watching her.
“I’m sure you do. But I’ll tell you now that you should be careful which ones you ask. You might not want all the answers.”
It sounded exactly like something Gran would say, but I was finished with riddles and half-truths. I wasn’t going to play that game anymore.
“I think I deserve to know what’s happening to me,” I said.
She continued working, almost as if she hadn’t heard me.
But a few seconds later, she sighed. “You’re not wrong about that, I suppose.”
She seemed to make up her mind, rinsing her hands in the bowl of water that sat on the counter. The expression on her face was unreadable, and I began to wonder if she was nervous. She fidgeted with the towel tucked into the waist of her skirt before she sat down on the other side of the table.
“So, where should we start?” she said.
“How about explaining how I got here. How all of this…” I lifted a hand, gesturing to the kitchen around us. “…is possible?”
“Well, I know less about that than you may imagine,” she answered. “I honestly don’t know how it began. My mother told me what her mother told her—that any woman in our bloodline will see that door at one point or another, and eventually, she’ll walk through it.”
That choice of words made me sit up straighter in the chair.
“What do you mean eventually? Like, it’s inevitable?”
“There hasn’t been a Farrow I know of who’s managed not to go through the door. It doesn’t stop appearing. Sure, you might decide you’ll never walk through it, but it comes again.
And then again. Until one day, you’ve finally got a good enough reason to open it.”
Her eyes studied me, head tilting like she was trying to see if I knew from experience what she meant.
“It wasn’t like that for me. I didn’t even know about any of this until yesterday.”
“It wouldn’t matter if you were six years old or if you were eighty. We’re like moths to the flame, and once you cross, it begins.”
“What begins?”
“The fraying.”
I waited.
She set her elbows on the table, as if settling, and I found myself wondering if she’d been the one to tell me all of this the last time. “I’ll explain it to you the way it was explained to me. Time is like a rope, made of many fibers, and when they’re bound up together, they make one strong timeline.”
She stared at me, waiting to be convinced of whether I was following.
“But once you cross it, it begins to fray. Those fibers loosen.
Unwind. Eventually, they are bound to unravel. Then you don’t have one timeline anymore.”
Two places at once. Two times at once.
“So, they’re real? The things I’m seeing and hearing?”
She nodded. “They’re just parallel threads.”
“But.” My mind went to that notebook I’d kept tucked under my mattress. “I only went through the door yesterday. If it starts after you cross, why did the episodes start a year ago?”
Esther squinted. “A year ago?”
“Yeah.”
“Exactly?”
“Almost. The first one was July 2, 2022.”
There was an unmistakable reaction that rippled through Esther’s body, but she recovered well, tucking a stray hair behind her ear and clearing her throat. “Well, this isn’t the first time you’ve crossed, June.”
As soon as she said it, I realized I already had the pieces of that puzzle. My mother disappeared when she was pregnant with me. She most likely gave birth to me on the other side.
“Are you saying that I was born here, in this time?”
“Well, not in this time, obviously. You were born in the year 1912, and the fray is different for all of us. Sometimes it takes months for it to begin, sometimes years. Decades.”
The explanation sounded practiced and carefully constructed, but Esther still looked shaken. Uncomfortable, even.
“For my mother,” she continued, “it began only a few months after she crossed, and it was swift, breaking her mind in a matter of years. For me, it took a long time to come on, and it’s been slow and steady.”
“So, you’re…?”
“Sick? It has nothing to do with being sick. It’s more like having two sets of eyes, one that sees this world and one that sees the other. Eventually, they start bleeding into each other, and that’s where the madness lies.”
“But how do you stop it?”
“You can’t. The door appears to the Farrow women, and at one point or another, they will walk through it. And once you’ve crossed, your mind never fully crosses back.”
I stared into the steam rising from my coffee cup, that familiar, bleak feeling settling back over me. I’d felt it. The
draw to the door had been like a tightening thread. Had I even hesitated before I reached for the knob? I couldn’t remember now.
“I suppose at one time or another, it was a useful gift.”
Esther paused. “But like everything else, it comes with a cost.”
“And Susanna?”
“Susanna was—” She stopped herself, as if trying to find the right words. “She met him—Nathaniel—the first time she crossed. Only days after. We told people she was a cousin visiting from Norfolk, Virginia. I thought she’d be here a few weeks and go, but those two…I’d never seen twin flames like that before, two people dragging each other so deep, so fast.”
That’s what had kept Susanna here, I thought. Love.
“Nathaniel and Susanna were both a little broken, to be honest, but they were passionate. They were never good for each other. She knew that, but she couldn’t help herself. His father was the minister, and our family isn’t exactly welcome in the church, so of course, he didn’t approve. They were meeting in secret for some time before I ever found out, and then it was much too late. A few months later, she was pregnant with you.”
A shadow flitted past the window, and Esther’s eyes followed a young man in a flat cap and denim shirt walking toward the barn with a digging fork propped on one shoulder.
His olive skin was a deep golden color that only came from long days in the fields.
“I convinced Susanna to cross back, but she returned months later. Once you were born, there was no undoing it.”
“But why would she take me back to her time and just… leave me there?”
Esther said nothing.
“Why would she do that? Why stay here without me?”
“I told you. I don’t know why Susanna did a lot of things.”
My hands slipped from the table and I sank back into the chair, staring at her. There was more to the story than she was telling me. I could see that. But this woman was different from Gran. Her edges were harder, her gaze sharp.
“She got sicker, much sicker, once you were gone. The doctors here in this time call it ‘hysteria,’ and eventually, it became too much for her. A few years later, she took her own life.”
The image of my mother standing up at the top of the falls, her eyes drifting over the drop, made me tremble.
“I thought it was over then. But five years ago, you showed up here looking for her.”
“And then?”
“Not so different from Susanna, you met Eamon. Fell in love. Got married. And then one day, you were gone.”
“And you don’t know where I went?”
She shook her head. “You were here one day and then you weren’t. This is the first we’ve seen of you in nearly a year.
It’s never happened like this before—an overlap.”
“Overlap?”
“A younger version of you showing up after an older version does. I don’t know what else to call it, and I don’t know what to make of it, quite honestly.”
Just listening to her say it out loud made me feel dizzy. “So, what? Does that mean there are two versions of me?”
“No, there isn’t more than one of any of us. If you cross into a different timeline, you don’t keep existing in the other.
You’re either here or there. But somehow, things have been
disrupted. You’re the same June I met five years ago, but if you don’t remember me, then you’re the younger her. You went through the door…early. The things that happened here haven’t happened to you yet.”
“How early am I?” I whispered. “How much earlier did I cross than before?”
“What year was it when you crossed?”
“2023.”
“Well, it’s early for you, but late for us. That’s the problem.
The first time you came here, it was 2024 for you.”
“2024,” I repeated, trying to wrap my mind around it.
That meant I most likely would have been thirty-five. I’d come through the door at least nine months after Gran’s funeral, maybe longer. And I hadn’t come to 1951. If it was five years ago, it had been 1946 for them.
Esther was studying me again, those pale eyes refocusing.
“Why did you choose 1951?”
“What?”
“When you crossed. Why did you choose 1951?”
“I didn’t choose anything. I walked through the door, and it brought me here.”
A look of disbelief flashed over her features. “The locket, June.”
Immediately, my hand went to my throat, fingers searching for the chain of the locket watch. But it wasn’t there. I set down the coffee cup and opened the collar of my shirt, searching for it.
“It’s gone,” she said.
“I must have dropped it in the field, or along the road.” I said, anxiously. “I—”
“You didn’t lose it.” She reached into the collar of her own dress, pulling a chain free. Then she was lifting it over her head. She set the locket watch down on the table between us.
I stared at it. “How did you…?”
“We’ll get to that.” She opened the locket, turning it so that the watch face was right side up for me. All four of the hands were pointing to the number zero. “So, you were wearing the locket, but you didn’t choose the year.”
I was so confused now that I didn’t have a response.
“Do you remember what the hands were set to?”
“I don’t know. I think five? One?” I swallowed. “Yes, there were two hands on one.”
“One, nine, five, one. 1951.” She said.
My eyes snapped up to look at her. “This is how you cross?”
“You fix the four hands into the four digits of a year, starting with the shortest. It was 2023 when you left?”
I nodded.
“All right.” She pulled a pin from her hair. Beginning with the shortest hand on the watch face, she moved them to the numbers two, zero, two, and three. When she was finished, she snapped it closed. “As long as the locket says 2023 when you open that door, that’s where it will take you.”
I turned it over in my fingers, dazed by the flicker of sunlight on the gold. I’d always known the watch didn’t work, and I’d found the four hands and missing numbers strange. But there was nothing about it I hadn’t dismissed with the reasoning that it was old. Very old. It still looked ancient, but the metal wasn’t quite as fogged and smoothed as the locket I’d worn around my neck.
I eyed the calendar tacked to the wall by the back door. It was a farmer’s almanac, open to the month of June. Today was
the seventeenth, only four days since Gran’s funeral. I didn’t know how that was possible. How had four days been enough time to completely unravel everything I thought I knew?
“I’ve never understood why your grandmother never told you any of this,” Esther murmured.
Gran.
That’s right. If it was 1951, then Gran was here. She’d been raised by Esther in this very house.
My hands slipped from the mug. “Where is she?”
Esther shifted in her seat, and for a moment, I wondered if she was considering lying to me. “She’s here.” Her hand came down on mine, stopping me before I could stand. “Listen to me.” She leaned in closer. “The best thing you can do, for all of us, is go back.”
I searched her face. What did that mean, for all of us?
“As soon as you see that door again, cross. And stay there.”
I wasn’t going to argue with that. “When will that be?”
She sighed. “There’s no exact timing, unfortunately.”
“No exact timing?” My voice rose. “Are you saying that I’m stuck here?”
Stuck. The word made me feel nauseous. Claustrophobic.
“It will appear again. You just need to be ready to walk through it.”
“There are people who will be looking for me.” The image of the empty Bronco on the road flashed in my mind. “How am I going to explain where I’ve been?”
“The same way the rest of us have explained it every time this has happened. You create a story, and you stick to it. You don’t draw attention, and you don’t offer explanations.
Frankly, the more mad they think you are, the better.”
That’s exactly what Gran and Birdie had done with my mother—let the town think she was crazy and that was the reason she’d gone missing. The reason she’d never come back.
It was much more believable than the truth.
I pressed my fingertips to my temples. I’d always known that they weren’t telling me everything they knew about Susanna. I thought it was because Gran was trying to protect me. That she didn’t want me to live in fear of what was coming. But really, she was protecting her daughter. And herself.
“Okay, what else do I need to know?”
“Well, there are rules.” She stood, going to the stove, and poured the rest of the coffee into another cup. “The door won’t open to you if you don’t have the locket, and you can cross only three times. After that, it won’t appear to you anymore.”
“But you just said I’ve been here before. If I crossed as a baby and then came here five years ago…”
She shook her head. “No. The last time you were here, you were older. The younger you has only crossed once—when you were seven months old. You, in this body, have now gone through the door only twice. Then, and now. You have one more crossing left, a choice to make. The same choice every Farrow makes eventually.”
I waited.
“Which side of time you want to live on. Which life you want to live.” She answered my unspoken question. “After that, there’s no going back.”
Is that what I’d done? Crossed to 1946 and eventually decided to cross back?
“And that’s not all. The second rule is that you may go only where you do not exist.” She pointed at the locket. “There’s only one of you, June, just like there’s only one of those
lockets. That will never change. The locket around your neck disappeared when you crossed because it already lives here. It ceased to exist. Your mind can exist in two places at once, but your body cannot. So, if you walked through the door right now and went back to a time in which you already exist in the future—say, 2022—you, also…disappear.”
I swallowed, the gravity of the idea like a weight pressing down on top of me.
“The other thing you need to think about is what kind of information you’ve brought with you. No talking about what happens in the future to any of us. No warning us of danger or opportunity or anything else. There are too many risks. Too many things that could be affected.”
My thoughts immediately went to Gran. There were decades of her life I’d witnessed. I even knew the exact day she died.
But the people on this side of time didn’t have that luxury.
“Who did people think I was when I came here?”
Esther slid the locket toward me. “It was years after Susanna died that you showed up. I said you were another cousin. Just left it at that, and people didn’t act too curious.
Not until…” Her voice trailed off. “Well, until things got complicated.”
“So, where do people think I’ve been all this time?”
“Taking care of your sick mother back in Norfolk.”
“For a year? People believe that?”
“Not really. That’s the problem.”
That was why the deputy had acted so suspicious, but it didn’t explain why that woman on her porch had been so terrified.
“Which is why I’m taking you home as soon as you finish that cup of coffee.”
I froze. “What?”
“We might have been able to keep this quiet until the door reappeared, but now you’ve been seen, June. If Sam saw you yesterday, the entire town will have heard that you’re back.”
“You can’t seriously expect me to go back to that house.”
“That’s exactly what I expect you to do.” Esther frowned. “I know your life was turned upside down when you ended up here, and if you feel like all of this isn’t fair, then you’re right.
You should have been told.” She lowered her voice, “Margaret should have prepared you. But while you’re on this side of the door, I expect you to do everything in your power to make sure our lives aren’t burned to the ground by the time you leave. It’s important that things go on as normal.”
She said it with a calm authority that didn’t leave room to argue, and that made me wonder just how much trouble the other June had caused them.
“He doesn’t want me there,” I said.
“No, but he knows that he needs you to be if we’re going to keep this town from turning our family inside out.”
I felt sick just thinking about the house on Hayward Gap Road. That bedroom. The photograph on the dressing table.
“You need to attract as little attention as possible while you’re here, and people will expect you to be at home with Eamon. Once you’re gone, we’ll figure out something to tell them.”
“Why are they so interested? Why do they care?”
“You’ve come at a…complicated time.” She said that word again.
She crossed the kitchen, going back to the sink. She was avoiding my gaze now.
“Are you going to tell me about that little girl?” I barely got the words out.
Esther stiffened just a little. “She’s Eamon’s daughter.”
The words felt intentionally incomplete. Did that mean she wasn’t mine, or that she was, but that I had no claim to her?
A creak popped overhead, and we both looked up to the milk-glass pendant light hanging over the table. The sound traveled across the ceiling until it reached the stairs. A moment later, a young woman was coming around the banister, one hand still struggling to tuck the tail of her blouse into her skirt.
She nearly tripped over her own feet when she saw me.
Wide blue eyes the color of storm clouds fixed on me, a blush reaching her freckled cheeks. “June.” She breathed my name, and even now, here, over seventy years away, it sounded the same.
Margaret Anne Farrow, the same one I’d buried only days ago, stood steps away.
Gran. Living. Breathing.
A smile broke on her lips, and she walked straight toward me, throwing her arms around my shoulders and squeezing hard. She was shorter than me. Thin and narrow. But it was her. The prick behind my eyes was now a painful burn, and when I inhaled the smell of her, an ache bloomed in my throat.
Without even meaning to, I leaned into her, holding on so tightly that a broken sound escaped me. I was instantly that little girl again, crying into her shoulder. After the last twenty- four hours, with every inch of reality shifting beneath me, she felt like solid, unbreakable ground.
She pulled back to look at me again, her eyes bright with amazement. There was a girlish smile on her lips and a sun- kissed pink that colored her cheeks. She wasn’t a woman at all, a girl more than anything else. She couldn’t be older than
sixteen or seventeen years old. But behind her eyes and in the air around her I could sense Gran. I could feel her. The woman who’d raised me. Who’d kept me.
I swallowed against the pain in my chest when the memory of standing on that hill for the burial flashed through my mind.
Having her right in front of me, warm to the touch, made that ache of losing her tear back open.
There was a knowing in the look that painted Esther’s face now. A solemn understanding. She knew that in my world, my time, this girl was already gone. She’d had to have known that the last time I came here.
“There’s work to do, Margaret.”
Margaret’s hands slipped from the sleeves of my shirt, a protest already brewing on her tongue. “But—”
Esther fixed her with her stare, and Margaret’s mouth snapped shut.
“We’re on sunnies today,” Esther said, using the sunflower nickname I’d only ever heard Gran use. “The delphinium we’ll cut tomorrow. It’s all going to town for the Faire.”
The Midsummer Faire.
I glanced to the calendar again. The summer solstice was labeled in red type on June 21, four days from now. With any luck, I’d be gone by then.
Margaret’s lips pursed defiantly, but she obeyed, giving me one last look before she headed to the back door. The screen slammed behind her.
Esther’s fair eyes sharpened on me. “Be careful. Best not to let her get too attached before you leave for good.”
I watched Margaret’s shape grow smaller through the window before she disappeared behind the fence.
“Eamon’s not the only one who was left with a broken heart.
Understand?”
I didn’t know if she was talking only about Margaret or if she was including herself in that statement. If she did have some kind of affection for me, then she was good at hiding it.
I’d felt little, if any, tenderness from her since I walked through the door.
If what they said was true, I couldn’t blame her. There were years of history between all of us, and it had ended with betrayal. Even if she was the only one who remembered it.
“I’ve got some things you can wear. You’ll have to give me those clothes. Anything else you brought with you that shouldn’t be here?” she asked.
I shook my head. I’d left everything in the truck.
Satisfied, Esther nodded. “Don’t take off that locket. Not even to sleep. You never know when that door will turn up.”
I picked it up, closing my fingers around it. “You still haven’t told me anything about why I left,” I said.
She finally fell quiet, leaning onto the counter with both hands as she reluctantly met my eyes.
I stared at her, waiting.
“It doesn’t matter why. That June is gone. Wherever she is, she’s years ahead of you now. The question is, honey, what are you doing here?”
