e were quiet a long time. Long enough for morning toW fully break over the fields and fill the room with light.
Eamon lay on his back with me fit against his side, and I pressed my closed mouth to his shoulder, my hand flat on his chest so that I could feel the heartbeat beneath his bones. With every thump, it was saying that he was real. This was real. It was happening.
I didn’t want to move, much less speak, afraid that I would disturb that sense of stillness that had found us. It was a fragile, precious thing. A calm that I didn’t want to believe would be followed by a storm.
Whatever this was, it wasn’t simple. I was trying to stitch together the fragments, pull them into one chronological timeline that told a story I could understand. But while the pieces were coming, they weren’t coming quickly, and none of them were in order.
I’d opened the red door like every Farrow had. I didn’t know that it would change my life forever. In my case, it had changed twice. Now there was one more choice to make, and the only one who could make it was me.
I could still feel the drag of Eamon’s touch across my skin.
The heaviness of him between my legs. I could smell him in
the sheets like I did that first day I woke with the warmth of his arms around me. There had been a part of me, even then, that was waking to this, like opening my eyes after a yearslong sleep.
What was so clear to me now was that Eamon was the only person who had ever really known me. Wholly. Completely.
I’d been lucky to have people who loved me. Gran. Birdie.
Mason. But there were parts of myself that I’d kept hidden away from them for their sakes as much as mine. I’d found a way to give it all to Eamon.
He was the only one who knew the things I really wanted.
The only person I’d never kept them from. But as I lay there, listening to the sound of his breathing, I needed to know if I was that person for him, too.
“I need to ask you something,” I whispered.
His fingers sleepily wove through mine on his chest, holding my hand there. “Okay.”
I studied the boundary along his collarbone where the sun had darkened his skin. Once I asked it, I wouldn’t be able to put the words back into my mouth. Once I heard his answer, I wouldn’t be able to unknow it.
“Did you kill Nathaniel Rutherford?”
The question was a small one for the meaning it carried. But my voice didn’t waver, and I didn’t hesitate. I would remember, eventually, but I needed to know now. And I needed him to be the one to tell me.
He was still for a long moment before his weight shifted in the bed, and then he sat up, making my hand slip from where it was tucked against him. He raked his hair back, his feet touching the floor, and I bit the inside of my cheek.
He was shutting me out again. I could see it in the change of his posture. The way his eyes went to the corner of the room.
I pushed myself up behind him, fitting my body to his. My arms snaked around his middle, my skin pressed to him. He was rigid, but when I set my cheek against his shoulder blade, he relaxed just a little.
“Are you asking because you’re trying to decide what kind of man I am?”
“I’m asking because I want to know the truth. All of it.”
Eamon set his elbows on his knees and put his face into his hands, breathing through his fingers. When he looked up again, he was half-lit by the window. Slowly, he pulled my hand so that I slid to the edge of the bed beside him. His eyes stared right into mine.
“Are you sure about that?”
I knew that I was. “You can trust me,” I said, and I meant it.
I didn’t know if there was anything he could say that would change that. Not now.
He fell silent again, his gaze moving over the room, as if he were trying to find the words. I waited, afraid that if I said anything else, he would change his mind. When he shifted, turning to face me, his hand came to my cheek, thumb tracing the curve of my bottom lip before it followed the line of my jaw.
I wasn’t sure what that look on his face was. Concern, or compassion, maybe. There was a gentleness, a caution, in his voice.
“I didn’t kill him, love,” he said. “You did.”
And as soon as the words left his mouth, I remembered.
