The Unmaking of June Farrow(95)

My mind raced, trying to match the timeline with the one that would play out more than seventy years from now.

“But then so much time went by that . . .” Her voice broke. “I thought maybe I’d messed it up, somehow.”

“What exactly did I tell you to do, Margaret?”

“I’m supposed to give you the locket and the other things you gave me. You told me to set the locket to 1951, not before, so that you wouldn’t risk returning to a time where you were still here.”

You cannot go where you already exist.

That was one of the rules.

I’d kept the hallucinations from Gran and Birdie for nearly a year. What Margaret couldn’t have known was when she would die. Mailing the photograph might have been her last-ditch effort. Her Hail Mary, hoping it would start the chain of events before it was too late.

All of this was my doing.

“Where did I go when I left, Margaret?”

She stared at her shoes, wiping her nose with her sleeve.

“It’s done now. I’m here. There’s no reason to keep it from me.”

She sniffed. “I need a piece of paper.”

Esther opened the door, and we followed Margaret inside. She took a piece of paper from the desk drawer in the sitting room and sat down, with us peering over her shoulder. We watched as she drew two waving, intertwined lines that looked eerily similar to the ones I’d imagined when I was trying to explain it to Eamon.

He glanced up at me, thinking the same thing.

“This is the Farrow line. Two woven times.” Margaret’s face was still swollen, but she was calm now. Focused. She put an X at the right end of the rope and wrote 1950 above it. “This is where it becomes one timeline.”

“I don’t understand.”

From the X, she drew a single straight line. “When you left, you sent yourself to a place on the timeline that overlaps your life here. You thought that would make it so there was only one time.”

“This is insane,” Eamon muttered, his irritation not hidden.

“We made the plan, and you were going to do it the next time you saw the door. But then that night at the Midsummer Faire . . .” Her mouth twisted. “I tried to convince you to wait until things had died down, but you were worried that if Caleb found out the truth about that night, you’d be arrested. If that happened, you wouldn’t be able to cross like you planned.”

We were all quiet, waiting.

“The next time the door appeared, you left.”

“Okay, but where did I go, Margaret?”

She bit her bottom lip. “To 2022.”

Esther’s eyes went wide.

Margaret didn’t drop her gaze from mine. “You went to a place you already exist.”

I shook my head. “So I’m . . . gone.”

If there couldn’t be two of me, then I had to be. But this, what she was saying, that meant that I’d willingly ended my own timeline. My own life.

“What do you mean, gone?” Eamon’s voice was barely audible.

Beside me, Esther pressed a hand to her mouth.

“I killed myself?” I said it out loud.

“No.” Margaret’s eyes widened. “You found a loophole. That’s all.”

My eyes narrowed on her. That was the word Esther had used.

“But what if it didn’t work? What if I was wrong about all of it?”

“You weren’t,” she said. “It’s already working.”

“What do you mean?”

She pointed to the straight, single line on the page before she picked up the pen. She continued the line by branching it into two that didn’t intertwine.

“There’s only one timeline now. This one and the one on the other side of the door. They can’t exist together anymore because you ended the fray. That’s why you’re losing memories.”

I hadn’t told Margaret that.

“That’s what’s happening right? You’re losing memories?”

Esther looked at me.

“So, what? I’m just going to lose my entire life?”

“Only if you don’t go back. You’re going to choose which life you want to live. If you stay here, then yes, you’ll lose your memories of that life. If you choose to go back, you’ll lose the ones from this one. You can’t have both. Not anymore.”

“Are you saying it actually worked?”

She nodded. “Yes. Once you lose all your memories of one life, your mind will exist only in one time. There’s no more fraying rope.”

I swallowed hard, chest burning with the breath I was holding. “So, it’s just . . . over?”

“For you and Annie, yes. Annie is an extension of your timeline. You thought that if you stopped the unraveling, it would keep hers from unraveling, too. If there’s no longer two timelines, the hope is that there’s no door connecting them. If there’s no door, Annie will never go through it.”

The four of us sat there in silence, the clock on the wall ticking.

“You said it was important that you had the choice.” Margaret’s voice softened.

When Esther had first told me that, there was no choice. I was going back, no matter what. And I still could. But if I crossed again to 2023, there was no returning. That would be my third crossing, and I’d forget my life here. I’d forget Eamon and Annie. If I stayed, I’d erase from my mind the entire life I’d lived before I got here. I’d never see Mason or Birdie again.