The Unmaking of June Farrow(79)

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. Looking at him in that photograph, there was no hint of the crazed, obsessive minister whom Susanna had both loved and feared. It 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. She barely looked up at me as 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.”