It comes on an ordinary day, at an ordinary hour, and the moment I feel it, my whole world stops.
That buzz in the air is one I know. I can feel it reach into the house, wrapping its tendrils around me.
The door.
Moonlight is cast across the wall of the sitting room, making everything look black-and-white. I see myself in the reflection of the kitchen window, the strap of my nightgown slipping from my shoulder. I’m standing over the stove, where the kettle is whirring, my blond hair hanging in a braid that almost reaches my waist.
Not now.
This isn’t how it’s supposed to go.
I meet my own eyes, letting myself paint that image in my mind. Me. In this home. A mother. A wife. I’ve prepared for this, but I still have to press my hand over my mouth to muffle the sound that breaks in my chest. I have to breathe through it so that I don’t wake her.
Through the open door of my bedroom, Annie is asleep beneath my quilts. I can hear her breathing.
The burn in my throat is nothing to the pain behind my ribs as my feet take me across the kitchen. She is bathed in blue light, her hair like silver. She’s asleep, I tell myself.
Eamon will be home any minute. She won’t wake. She won’t even stir.
I have no choice but to hope it’s true.
It’s been almost eighteen months since I last saw the door, and every day that passes is a day that Caleb Rutherford could discover the truth. It’s only a matter of time before it finds its way into the light. When it does, I’ll have lost my chance.
I step into the room, rounding the bed. Annie’s cheeks frame a perfect pink mouth, and I press my lips to her temple. I inhale her scent as deep as I possibly can.
There isn’t time to second-guess it or wait for Eamon’s headlights on the road. My feet take me to the dressing table, and I pull the ring from my finger. I drop it into the dish below the mirror and remember the words I wrote on that envelope—a message that will be carried through time, back to me.
Trust me.
I hope that I will.
I open the back door, not bothering to wrap a shawl around my shoulders or take the lantern with me. The tobacco fields are so thick that the wind makes the leaves look like dark water in the moonlight. That vibration on the wind is even more alive out here, and I follow it into the nearest row. The plants swallow me up, my bare feet sinking in the soft, damp soil, and I walk, hands catching the leaves as I pass.
I see it a few paces later. The chipped red paint. The shimmer that surrounds it in the air.
The door sits in the middle of the field, hidden from the rest of the world.
I am a stone sinking into a deep, dark sea. And I’m not coming back.
I reach the door with a final, silent footstep, and the wind picks up, pulling my nightgown around me. It’s the same door that has appeared for the last five years, and the last time I opened it, I’d been someone else. I had no idea what waited on the other side.
The weight of the locket is suddenly heavy around my neck, and I reach inside my nightgown, pulling it free. It clicks as it opens, and I turn its face toward the moonlight.
The hands are set to 2022. A place where I exist, where a thirty-three-year-old June Farrow is caring for her ailing grandmother and trying to keep the farm running. Afraid of the future. Grieved by the past. And I’m putting every bit of hope I have in her.
I lift my unsteady hand, and the moment my fingertips touch the doorknob, I don’t give myself time to change my mind. I turn it. Pull it open. What lies on the other side is a blackness I have never seen. It’s a darkness that eats itself.
A thick wall of nothing.
I’m shaking as my foot crosses the threshold. My breath is a storm inside my head, and when I pull the door closed behind me, the crack of moonlight becomes a sliver. A knife in the dark.
It disappears with a click.
I’m
I
