he memories were coming, whether I wanted them or not.T
Eamon was waiting when I came over the hill, eyes on the road like he’d been waiting for me to appear there. As soon as he saw me, he turned on his heel, stalking up the drive and toward the house. I braced myself as I got out of the truck.
Margaret was already gone, and there was no sign of Annie.
The house was empty except for Eamon’s sobering presence.
He stood in the sitting room when I came through the door, the lines of him rigid.
“Where were you?” he asked.
My hand tightened around the keys. I could lie to him, but I couldn’t see a point to it. “I went to see Mimi Granger.”
Whatever Eamon had expected me to say, it wasn’t that. The stern look on his face melted away, replaced by shock. “You what?”
I lifted my chin. “I went to see her. To ask about that night.”
Eamon stared at me, speechless.
“I have to know, Eamon. If you and Esther aren’t going to tell me what really happened here—”
“I told you what happened.”
“Not everything,” I said, more quietly.
His jaw clenched. “There are things you don’t need to know, June.”
“But I will know them. I’m remembering. I’m getting more memories every single day. Eventually, I will be able to recall that night,” I said, feeling my stomach clench. “And everything after.”
I didn’t want to say it, but the moment I was really thinking of was when I left. The moment I’d decided to walk away. It was the only memory I dreaded as much as I needed it.
Eamon ran a hand over his face, breathing through his fingers. He was coming undone in places, too. I could see it.
Feel it, even.
“I’m beginning to think that maybe you don’t want me to remember,” I said, more quietly. “You don’t want me to know what you’re hiding.”
His eyes snapped up to meet mine, defensive and cold. But he wasn’t even going to try to deny it. That one look made me feel like my heart was breaking—an acute, palpable pain I’d never felt before. I’d never understood that expression because I’d never given my heart to anyone. But that’s exactly what I’d done in my own future—Eamon’s past. Now the man who stood before me, who’d loved me, whom I’d trusted, was torn between two versions of me.
I turned, headed for the door, and Eamon’s steps followed.
“June.” He said my name with a tenderness that made me bite down hard onto my lip. “June, listen.”
But I was already out the door, down the steps, climbing back into the truck. I started the engine and didn’t look back as I left, not even thinking for a second about where I was headed. I followed the road I’d traveled a thousand times when I felt like I had nowhere else to go.
I pulled into the flower farm a few minutes later, cranking the emergency brake with my gaze fixed on the fields before me. Dahlias and sunflowers bobbed in the wind as far as the eye could see. There were a few hats moving among them, making me think of Mason, and I was so homesick for him that I could cry.
A young Malachi Rhodes was digging a shallow trench a few feet away from the southernmost plot, an irrigation technique we still used on the farm. Esther had been ahead of her time on that practice, but now I wondered how much she’d learned from the future. Had Susanna brought with her the knowledge that Margaret had learned? Had I? Which way had the wisdom traveled?
My feet were heavy as they took me up the porch, but I stopped short when I saw a copy of the Jasper Chronicle on the top step.
I picked it up and unfolded it.
ONE YEAR LATER: STILL NO ANSWERS
It was one of the articles I’d found in the state archives, back when all of this began. But here it was, fresh off the press and sitting on Esther’s porch—the issue that marked the one year anniversary of Nathaniel Rutherford’s death.
Below the headline, Nathaniel’s picture stretched across the page. He was smiling, the church at his back, the edges of his white shirt invisible against it. His fedora-style hat was just a little tilted to one side, following the slope of his mouth.
The town of Jasper remembers the life of Nathaniel Christopher Rutherford, longtime minister at First Presbyterian Church of Jasper. Today marks one year since his death on the eve of June 21, 1950, a tragic mystery that his son, Merrill County Sheriff Caleb Rutherford, has vowed to solve.
Mourners gathered at the church on Saturday evening in remembrance, for a chorus of Nathaniel’s favorite hymns. The songs could be heard all the way down Main Street, only a mile and a half from where Nathaniel’s body was found by Edgar Owens, who was fishing on the river the morning after his death.
Those close to Nathaniel knew that he considered himself a modern-day Job, content to suffer as God saw fit. After the sudden loss of his father when he was a young man, Nathaniel then buried his infant daughter. Only a few years later, he lost his wife, a victim of long-term hysteria. After dedicating his remaining years to the town he loved and cherished, he died at the age of sixty-three. He is survived by his son, Caleb Rutherford, and the congregation that knew him to be a loyal shepherd.
The man that the town remembered was a far cry from the one Esther, Eamon, and Caleb described. He’d been beloved as a spiritual leader and pitied for the suffering he’d endured.
Revered for his dedication to the people of this town. There was no hint of the crazed, obsessive minister whom Susanna had both loved and feared. His didn’t look like the face of a man who’d wanted to kill his own child or who’d tried to rid his wife of demons.
“Can I help you?”
The voice finds me, sweeping me into a memory as vivid and clear as the world around me. The moment I hear it, I let myself sink. Faster. Deeper.
“Can I help you?”
The colors bubble and bleed until I’m standing before the church, eyes fixed on that narrow steeple from below. The wind whips my hair into my face as I stare up at it. Heavy boots crunch on the rocks, drifting toward me.
“Have you come for prayer?”
I turn around, wringing my hands when I see him.
Nathaniel Rutherford, the man who’d been my mother’s end, stands only feet away. He’s my father, a monster that lives in the church beside the river, but I had to see him with my own eyes. I had to look into that face and try to see what it was that had bewitched the woman who’d left me. But I don’t see anything at all. I feel only like a cavern has opened inside of me that will never close.
As if he can hear my thoughts, the warm smile on his face begins to melt, falling by the second. His brow pulls as he studies me.
“I’m sorry, have we met?” His voice suddenly sounds strained.
I blink, wondering if he somehow knows. If there’s some part of him that can sense that I’m his daughter. The one whose body is missing from the cemetery. Would he believe it if I told him?
“I’m visiting my aunt.” My mouth moves around lifeless words. I can hardly hear myself say them, because all I can think is that this man wanted me to die. “Esther Farrow.”
The wind pulls my hair from my shoulders, and his gaze jumps down to my throat. He takes an involuntary step backward when his eyes focus on my birthmark.
I reach up, pressing a hand to my skin as if it’s burning, and his eyes travel up to meet mine again. They’re filled with panic now.
His face blurs, evaporating with the vision, and the church disappears in a matter of seconds.
I was standing on Esther’s porch again, disentangled from the tentacles of the memory.
I let the paper close in my hands, staring at the front door of the house. The women in this family were good at keeping secrets. Margaret, Susanna, even me. And maybe that was true for no one more than Esther Farrow.
Gran had known Susanna’s story, but she’d never shared it with me, always steering me away from digging too deep into my mother’s disappearance. I always thought it was because it hurt too much to revisit the loss of her own daughter, but maybe she’d known long before Susanna was ever born what end she’d meet. In fact, she’d grown up in the wake of it.
But Esther had seen firsthand the darkness in Nathaniel when he asked her to take my life, and she’d been so afraid of Caleb that she’d pulled that gun from the glove box, ready to use it. Her words were branded in my mind.
The only devil in this town was Nathaniel Rutherford.
That kind of thing can get into the blood.
If she believed that, I couldn’t know what she would have done to protect me, Susanna, Margaret, or Annie.
I found her in the kitchen when I came inside. The sleeves of her shirt were rolled up past her elbows as she worked over the butcher block. The knife came down through the carcass of a whole, plucked chicken and onto the wood with a cracking sound.
“Margaret says there was quite a scene at the house today,” she said, prying the blade to one side and breaking a bone.
I felt sick when I heard that sound.
“I hope you got it out of your system.”
“I’m forgetting things,” I said, my voice cutting her off.
The knife stilled, and she finally looked up at me. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve been remembering things from my life here since before I arrived. I didn’t know they were memories at first, but they are. Now I’m forgetting things, too.”
“What things?”
“Memories of my life before, in 2023 and all the years leading up to it. They’re just fading, like they were never there.”
There was a long moment before she set the knife down.
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Because I wasn’t sure what was happening. Now I am.”
Esther came around the butcher block without a word, methodically washing her hands. I could see her thinking as she scrubbed the suds up her arms.
“What does it mean?”
“I don’t know. I told you, this has never happened before.
We’ve always crossed on parallel time, but somehow, you’ve found a loophole. Technically, you went somewhere you don’t exist, but it was a place you had once been. There isn’t a rule book for that. Hell, there isn’t a rule book for any of it.”
We stared at each other.
“What if—” My voice turned brittle. “What if the door isn’t going to reappear because I’ve broken it somehow?”
Her forehead wrinkled. “How?”
“I don’t know. But you said that for us, time was a fraying rope, right? Multiple strands. If I’m gaining memories from one life and losing them from the other, maybe that means that time is mending for me. Maybe it means that I won’t be able to cross a third time.”
It was a theory, one that was based on nothing but my own fear. I was grasping at straws.
Esther wrapped her arms around me, holding me close to her. “We all have to make a choice,” she said softly, “and it’s different for each of us. Yours will be different from mine.
From Margaret’s. And Susanna’s.”
I let myself lean into her, closing my eyes. The problem was that I’d already made my choice when I left this place. I wasn’t sure I’d get to make another.
“You don’t think she killed herself, do you?” I whispered, asking the question as bluntly as I could. I wasn’t going to dance around things anymore, afraid to disrupt their lives. This had been my life, too. “You think Nathaniel killed Susanna.”
There was no denial in her eyes or in her silence, a slow admission settling on her face. “I told you. There was something about your mother that just wasn’t…right. She had no center to her, no inner compass. She was one of those people who was blown by the wind, at the mercy of her feelings and her fears,” she paused. “She wasn’t like you, June. I loved her, but she was weak.”
There was a deep echo of guilt behind the words. On some level, Esther felt responsible.
“I thought she’d done the right thing, sending you through the door, but there was no going back after that. Truly. It was more than the splitting of time and what it did to her mind. She was ruined in other places we couldn’t see.”
“That sounds to me like someone who might take their own life,” I said.
She smiled sadly. “No. She wasn’t strong enough, even for that, I’m afraid.”
It was such a cruel thing to say, but the love she had for Susanna was evident in her voice. It had been since the first time I’d heard Esther talk about her that way.
“They never found her.” She continued. “She wouldn’t be the first to die at the falls, and it might take days or weeks, but eventually, there’s a body. That part was odd, though not impossible. And when the man who saw her jump was the town minister, no one questioned it.”
If she was right, then the most beloved man in Jasper, the man whose own son called him a cruel bastard, was a murderer. And the only one who seemed to know it was Esther. Probably Eamon, too. What lengths would he have gone to to be sure Annie and I were safe from a man like that?
Esther wasn’t avoiding my gaze anymore, letting me see for the first time what lay within her. Esther Farrow wasn’t just a
farmer or a grandmother or a town outcast. This woman was a flame. She was dangerous, too.
The thing she and Eamon had in common was that ferocious protectiveness. If he murdered Nathaniel, maybe she’d helped.
It was even possible that they’d planned it together.
“Do you think Eamon did it?” I asked, not mincing words.
“Do you think that Eamon killed Nathaniel?”
She knew the answer to that question. I could see it in the wide openness of her eyes.
“I don’t know what happened that night, and I’ve never asked. But that man would have done a lot worse for you,” she said.
That wasn’t a complete answer, but it confirmed what I suspected—that she believed Eamon was capable of killing.
I drove myself back to the house, leaving the keys to Esther’s truck on the driver’s seat, the way Margaret had done.
Eamon was waiting at the kitchen table, but I walked straight past him, to the bedroom, unbuttoning my dress and letting it fall from my shoulders. The mountain air was cool at night, even when the days were warm. I pulled on the nightdress before I braided my hair over my shoulder and turned on the lamp.
The article I’d torn from the newspaper at Esther’s was still in my pocket, and I drew it out, adding it to the others hidden behind the bed. I could hear Annie’s small footsteps trailing after Eamon’s in the house. There was the jostle of dishes in the kitchen. The sound of the kettle. They ate dinner, and he didn’t knock on my door.
I watched their shadows move where the crack of light was shifting on the floor, until the house went dark and silent. I imagined that this was what this home had been like for the last year without me in it. A shell. A tomb.
It was like the embers of a sleeping fire somewhere inside of me, the capacity I had to hold this version of a life. I couldn’t quite grasp it, but that feeling I’d had looking at Eamon as we stood in the glowing lights of the Midsummer Faire had fully manifested now. I didn’t know what was me and what wasn’t anymore. Was I becoming someone else, or was I just finally becoming myself? I couldn’t tell.
Long after the moon rose, when I still hadn’t closed my eyes, I got up and went to the mirror that hung over the dressing table. I drew in a slow breath, my hand finding the thin fabric of my nightgown, and I pressed my palm flat against my stomach. The heel of my hand followed my hip bone.
This body had carried a child. The very thought was an explosion behind my ribs. My heart felt like it was going to break through my chest every time I dared to envision it.
I could see it in my fractured mind, the image of me in that mirror, barefoot and belly swollen. I could feel it.
I bit down on my lip, the vision painting itself in such specifics that I began to think I’d created it from nothing. But this wasn’t the blurred conjuring of imagination. This was like that moment my hand moved up the planes of Eamon’s back, as if it already knew its path.
A soft cry bled through the walls of the bedroom, and I sucked in a breath, my hand curling tight from where it was pressed to my abdomen. Annie was crying that delirious, sleepy sound that surfaced every night like clockwork.
I stilled, waiting for Eamon’s footsteps to follow, but they didn’t come, the empty silence of the house widening. When her cries grew louder, I struck a match and lit the candle on the bedside table.
The glow of the light gathered in the eaves, floorboards popping underfoot as I came out of the bedroom. Eamon’s
boots were toppled beside the fireplace, and I spotted his sleeping form on the sofa. One black-stained hand was resting on his broad chest, and he hadn’t even gotten undressed. He was exhausted, too far fallen into a desperate sleep to hear his own daughter’s cries.
Annie’s whimper drifted through the dark, and I crept toward it, my eyes adjusting to the shadows as I moved by the moonlight coming through the window. The lace curtain draped over her nook cast shapes on the wall as I set the candle down on the shelf. She was sitting up, the rag doll cradled in her arms.
She sniffed, hiccuping through another cry.
“Shhhh.” I crouched beside the bed, finding her cold little hands with mine.
I half expected her to call out for Eamon, but she quieted just a little, wiping her face with the doll’s skirt.
“Lie down, Annie,” I whispered, trying to guide her back to the blankets, but she pulled at my fingers.
Before I even knew what I was doing, I was climbing into the bed, scooting behind her so that I could lie against the wall. She settled down, tucking herself beside me. Her feet wedged themselves beneath my legs and she went still. It was only seconds before she fell back asleep.
Her hand loosened on the doll until it rolled between us, and I lay there, watching her, like at any moment I would wake and find myself somewhere else. This felt like one of those memories—where I both belonged and didn’t belong to the slice of time that was playing out.
Her face turned into the candlelight, and I breathed in her smell, like sugar and soap.
The wood floor popped again, making me still, and I searched the darkness until I saw him. Eamon was on his feet,
slowly crossing the sitting room until the light painted his face.
It was shadowed with sleep, his hair mussed, and the expression on his face was confused, as if he thought he was dreaming. But the waking settled over his features as he looked down at us, a deep breath escaping him.
I waited for him to tell me to go, but he didn’t. He was quiet for a long while, and in that space that hung between us, I could feel the tension of countless conversations that would never be had. What did he see when he looked at me? Was it still a counterfeit version of his wife? It didn’t feel like that anymore.
He sat on the edge of the bed, and I watched as he lay down on the other side of Annie. His arm came around her, resting beside mine, and he met my eyes over the tangle of her blond hair fanned out over the pillow. The air grew thick with the weight of what this was—a rendering that was too real. I fit into this space. All three of us did.
The light grew dimmer as the last of the candle melted down, and when it snuffed out, the darkness fell over us. The smell of smoke bled through the air. I couldn’t see Eamon’s face anymore, but I could sense him, the warmth of his body on the other side of the bed. His arm so close to mine that if I moved even an inch, I could touch him. And somehow, I knew what I’d find. I could predict the feel of his skin, the hair that thickened along his forearm and the bones that framed his arm.
His hand found mine, moving up my wrist to my elbow, and my fingers slipped beneath the sleeve of his shirt. We held on to each other, Annie sleeping between us.
It was the first time since I’d come through the door that I didn’t feel like I was broken in two, and it wasn’t until that moment, the red door skipping through my mind, that I realized this was the first day since I came here that I hadn’t looked for it.
No, I hadn’t thought of it. Not even once.
