picked up the crumpled wedding dress, smoothing theI white lace beneath my palm. The fabric looked like it was intact, but there was a smudge of dirt along the bodice, where it had been stepped on.
Eamon’s hammer echoed through the house as he drove a nail into the doorjamb. The loose hinge of the screen had come out when Caleb and Eamon barreled outside, leaving it hanging. We’d spent the day putting things back together to mimic some semblance of normality, though the disturbing feeling that someone had been in here still lingered in the air.
I’d already collected what couldn’t be saved—a broken perfume bottle, torn papers, the bedside table that had toppled over and cracked a leg. The last of the mess was the clothes that had been taken from the wardrobe and the quilts stripped from the bed.
This was what Eamon had meant about things getting out of hand. Caleb was hell-bent, so fixated on us that he’d been willing to break the law to get what he needed. He was a man on the verge of becoming unhinged, making me think that Esther had been right about him. He may have hated his father, but he still had Nathaniel’s blood running through his veins.
I hung up the dress, my eyes following Annie through the bedroom window. She was walking the edge of the field, tapping the wide, flat leaves of tobacco with her hands as she made her way to the house.
Eamon came inside, and I met him in the kitchen, leaning into the wall beside the back door. We’d been like that all day, quiet and not wanting to say out loud what we were thinking.
Things were catching up to us, and Eamon and I were one thing. Annie was another.
“The articles and the photograph don’t prove anything other than the fact that we were interested.” He said, “There have to be dozens of people in Jasper who kept those same clippings.
But the years that were written down, you don’t know what they mean?”
“I’m pretty sure they correspond with crossings.”
He tore a sheet from the notepad on the counter and set it onto the table before he found a pencil and handed it to me.
“Do you remember them?” he asked.
I nodded, taking a seat before I wrote the years out in the same order they’d been on the paper that Caleb took.
1912
1946
1950 1951
Before what happened last night, I hadn’t told him about the things I’d found in the bedroom, because I wasn’t sure what they meant or if I’d had a reason for hiding them from him in the first place. But we were beyond that now. Eamon and I were going to have to find a way to be honest with each other if we were going to keep things from burning down.
He came to stand beside me, close enough to conjure to life the lantern-lit moment in the barn when he’d kissed me. I
hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it.
He set both hands on the table, studying the numbers.
I kept writing, annotating the years.
1912—Esther brings June to 1989 (age 7 months)
1946—June (age 35) arrives 1950—June (age 39) leaves
Eamon was quiet as I tried to work it out.
I set the tip of the pencil back down on the paper, filling it
in.
1951—June (age 34) returns
“This is the one that doesn’t make sense. Why would I write down a year in the future?”
“Maybe you were planning to come back.”
I shook my head. “1950 was my third time to cross, which means I knew I couldn’t go back through the door.”
“Well, in a way, you did come back.”
That’s what worried me—the five-year overlap, or loophole, as Esther had called it.
I closed my eyes, running over every piece of the puzzle I had. There was something about all of this that felt planned, like Eamon said.
“You said before that I promised you I wouldn’t go back through the door? Is that because you thought I was going to?”
“I don’t know what I thought.”
“There had to be a reason you made me promise. What was it?”
Eamon stared at the paper on the table, arms crossed over his chest.
“It started when you found out you were pregnant,” he began. “You didn’t want children because you knew you would have a daughter and that she would go through what you had. So, when we got married, we agreed. But things didn’t go as planned. I thought you wouldn’t want to have the baby, but you did.”
This changes everything.
The words floated to the surface of my thoughts. I could hear my own voice saying them.
“You changed your mind because you wanted her. And then, when she was born, you became so focused on breaking this…” He searched for the word. “Curse. You wouldn’t accept that you couldn’t fix it.”
This changes everything. You know that, right?
“This is what Esther was talking about,” I said, remembering. “When she said that this is how it all started last time?”
He nodded. “The more time that went by, the more obsessed you became. You were coming up with all kinds of theories on how to keep Annie from getting sick, and some of them involved trying to go back through the door. I was worried. We all were. You weren’t well, and I was afraid that you were going to do something dangerous.”
Maybe I had, I thought.
You weren’t well.
That’s what Esther had said about Susanna.
“You think that’s what happened, don’t you?” I guessed.
“You think I tried to break the curse and failed.”
“Even if you did,” he paused, “that doesn’t answer the question of where you went.”
“No, but it answers the question of why.” I looked up at him.
As soon as I thought it, the cold, biting reality sank in.
There was nothing to find because this trail of breadcrumbs led nowhere. By the time I went through that door, my mind could have been gone in the way Susanna’s was before she died. Maybe I’d already lost myself completely.
I stared into space, that sickening feeling in my gut making my heart kick up again. It was sinking in that somewhere in time, I was gone. Really gone. The thought made me feel the frost-laced breath of death on my skin.
I stood up from the table, a little too quickly, and the pencil rolled, hitting the floor. I needed to breathe. To pull air into my lungs and feel the wind on my face. I needed to get out of here.
I went through the open back door and down the steps, pushing my hands into my hair. I was too cold now, even with the humid summer heat, a chill aching deep in the center of my bones. The earth was spinning, and I could feel it, the motion of the entire planet swirling and making my head spin.
I’d been trying to understand how I could have left Annie, but I hadn’t considered that she was the reason why. I’d broken vows for her. Ones I’d made to myself and ones I’d made to Eamon. There was nothing that could have prepared me for a love like that, to sit and watch a dying thing grow.
The fate of the Farrows was Annie’s fate, too. Maybe I’d risked everything to change it.
I turned in a circle, scanning the edge of the field for her, but she wasn’t there.
“Annie?” I called out, lifting a hand over my eyes to block the sun. She wasn’t outside the barn or at the paddock fence, either.
“Annie!” I walked toward the garden, leaning over the fence, but it was empty.
Eamon came down the back steps, watching me.
“Where is she? Did she come in the house?”
“No.” His eyes were on the road now, tracing the edges of the farm.
My steps quickened as I headed for the barn, and I yanked the heavy sliding door open, ignoring Callie’s insistent reach over the fence.
“Annie?” I stepped inside, looking for her. “Annie!”
The stalls and the hayloft were silent.
When I came out of the barn, Eamon was jogging toward me from the house.
“She’s not in there,” I panted, my voice getting frantic now.
Eamon cupped his hands around his mouth. “Annie!” His deep voice carried over the fields, farther than mine could travel. We both stood frozen, listening.
“Where is she?” I studied the road. Had I seen a car pass by? “Eamon, where is she?”
My hand gripped onto his sleeve so tightly that pain pierced through the knuckles of my fingers. I couldn’t feel my heartbeat anymore.
“What about the river?” It was in the distance, beyond the tree line that sat behind the hill.
He shook his head. “She wouldn’t wander that far.”
The entire look of his face had transfigured, a look of pure terror consuming him. We were asking ourselves the same question. Only last night, Caleb Rutherford had broken into our home. He’d threatened me. Us.
Eamon pushed me in the other direction, hand pointing to the northeast corner of the fields. “Start on that side, I’ll go this way.”
I ran, legs driving me forward until I was disappearing into the farthest row of tobacco. “Annie!” My voice cracked as I flew through the fluttering leaves. “Annie!”
The panic sent my thoughts scattering in every direction, but I couldn’t follow them. Eamon’s voice was ringing out in the distance, growing more desperate every time he shouted her name. Each time I heard it, the chill deepened in my blood.
I didn’t slow as I reached the end of the row, and then I was doubling back on the next, eyes searching the field. My throat was raw as I called for her again and again.
“Mama!” A tiny voice found me.
I stopped, catching myself on the stalks before I could stumble forward. I held my breath as I listened. Eamon was still calling out, the sound muffled by the wind. Had I imagined it?
“Mama!”
The pain of hearing that word detonated inside of me, making everything tilt and shift.
I took a step in the direction of the voice, then another.
“Mama! Look!”
I pressed myself between the plants, into the next row, then the next, looking for her. When I spotted her pink dress in the forest of green, a sob broke in my chest. She was so small beneath the height of the tobacco, standing in the center of the row. Her brown eyes were wide with excitement, her hands cupped together in front of her.
“Eamon! She’s here!”
I walked straight toward her, hardly able to stay on my feet.
My insides collapsed as my knees hit the dirt in front of her. I hadn’t realized I was crying, hot tears dripping from my chin.
I wrapped my arms around her, pulling her into my lap. My face pressed into her hair as I wept.
“Look,” she whispered, her hands opening between us to reveal a ladybug.
It crawled across her palm, the vision of it blurring through my tears.
“I see it,” I rasped, wiping my cheek with the back of my hand.
Eamon burst into the row a second later, chest deflating when he saw us. His face was flushed as he sank down and pulled us both into him, and I curled into Eamon as Annie curled into me. She peered at the ladybug, oblivious to the two minutes of horror we’d just gone through.
I didn’t care that this crossed the line of keeping my distance or confusing boundaries. In that moment, I needed there to be no space between the three of us. I needed to feel us together, with no beginning and no end.
I’d never felt fear like that. Not ever. And I didn’t think there was any way to ever come back from that explosion of light that had birthed a universe inside of me when she said that word.
Mama.
