As the kettle whirred on the stove, I started the biscuit dough, folding the milk into the peaks of flour with one hand while I turned the mixing bowl with the other. My blistered knuckles burned as I stirred. It was the same recipe that I’d grown up making with Gran and that she’d grown up making with Esther. I’d decided to start here, with things I knew I would have brought with me through the door the first time, and it was working. In fact, it was working better than I’d expected.
The groan of the little bed in Annie’s nook made me look up from the wide-mouthed bowl. Through the doorway, I could see Eamon sitting up stiffly, as if his whole body hurt. He’d slept the rest of the night in that bed, him and Annie tangled together, and I’d had to force my eyes to stop finding them as I moved quietly through the house. They, too, felt like a fixed point. A gravity relentlessly pulling at my edges.
Eamon’s gaze scanned the house, eyes blinking against sleep, and when they found me, his brow furrowed. He stood, making a half-hearted attempt to comb his hair back with his fingers, and his white shirt hiked up on one side to reveal his hip. I immediately dropped my eyes, heat flaring along my collarbone. Eamon was the kind of handsome that was carved from forests and rivers. He had the look of someone who’d spent his life in the sun, hands in the dirt. Every color, curve, and angle of him was shaped with it. That stomach-dropping feeling inside of me when I looked at him was a reflex, I told myself. Just a different kind of recall.
When he made it into the kitchen, he leaned into the wall with one shoulder, watching me. His jaw flexed as he swallowed, the seconds reconstructing themselves into a white-knuckled silence.
I stopped stirring. “What?”
He shook his head as if trying to break loose whatever train of thought was there. “Nothing.” His voice was a deep rasp. “It’s just—” He didn’t finish.
I set my hands on the table, waiting and noticing that for once, he wasn’t angry. He looked almost upset, like he was swallowing down that same pain in his chest that I could feel expanding behind my ribs.
“It’s just that sometimes”—he paused—“it’s hard to look at you.” His accent was thicker. With sleep or emotion, I couldn’t tell. But it made that spreading pain find my hollow places.
I bit the inside of my cheek, unsure of what to say, but Eamon didn’t give me the chance to respond. He turned back into the sitting room, taking something from the side table next to the sofa. When he came back, he held it out to me.
It was a pair of gloves. Small leather gloves.
My eyes traveled up to meet his, but they were off of me now. “Are these . . . ?”
“Yours,” he answered.
I looked down at my hands. They were torn up from working in the garden yesterday, my calluses useless without gloves. My skin was striped with cuts, my nails rimmed in red.
I took the offering, pressing the soft, worn leather between my fingers, and a small lump came up into my throat. “Thank you,” I said, softly.
He nodded once, filling the kitchen with that silence again before he gestured to the percolator on the stove. “May I?”
I looked at him in confusion before I realized he was asking permission to pour himself a cup of coffee. “Oh, yeah,” I stammered awkwardly, tucking the gloves into the back pocket of my jeans.
He turned to the side, moving past me in the small kitchen, and when he reached over me for the cup, the space between us grew narrower. A feeling like static surfaced on my skin, an electric hum that made me draw away from him just slightly. I couldn’t help it.
When he noticed, he stepped backward, giving his back to me.
I picked up the spoon, stirring, and I watched him from the corner of my eye as he took a sip of coffee. “I knew her name,” I said.
His cup stopped midair, eyes locking with mine. “What?”
I let out a long breath, trying to decide how much I wanted to tell him.
“The horse. Yesterday, I remembered her name before you told me what it was.”
Eamon was still rigid, his eyes fully awake now. “How?”
“It just . . . came to me.”
“What else do you remember?” His voice was tight now, nearly defensive, and a fragmented recognition flickered to life inside me when I heard it.
I studied the tension in his shoulders. The clench in his jaw. “Almost nothing. Just little things here and there.”
“How can you remember something if it hasn’t happened to you yet?”
“I don’t know.”
Eamon was anxious now, but I didn’t know why. It was almost as if he were afraid of me knowing something, and I couldn’t help but wonder what it was. I’d been planning to ask him about the newspaper articles I’d found last night, but now I thought better of it.
“I wanted to ask you.” I paused, taking a different tack. “Did I keep a journal?”
He set the coffee cup down. “No.”
“Maybe a notebook of some kind?”
“Nothing like that.”
I stared at the floor, thinking. That could mean that I’d stopped having episodes after I came here, or maybe I’d just stopped writing them down. That, or Eamon wasn’t telling me the truth. The thought hadn’t occurred to me before now. What reason would he have to lie?
“What about—”
“The answer is no,” he said again.
“I’m just trying to think of anything that might help me make sense of why I left. Where I went.”
“I know where you went.”
I looked at him, shifting on my feet. I hadn’t expected him to say that, but he looked directly at me, a confidence in his gaze that couldn’t be mistaken.
My voice was a breath. “Where?”
“Back.” The single word a heavy, solid thing between us.
If that was true, there had to be a reason. I wouldn’t have just left. Somehow, I knew that.
The screech of the gate out at the road drew Eamon’s attention to the front window, and with his eyes off me, I finally exhaled. Margaret was here, and she and Esther seemed to be the only buffers between me and Eamon. The vulnerable, sleep-infused first moments of morning were gone, and it had taken only seconds for him to put his guard back up and shut me out. He was a field of buried land mines.
If he wasn’t going to talk to me, I’d have to rely on my own memories, maybe even find a way to trigger more of them on my own. That, or find a way to get answers somewhere else. Margaret, I suspected, could help with that. Esther was prudent and careful, but there was a version of Margaret I knew better than anyone.
Three heavy knocks pounded on the door, and the shadow of a figure moved over the wall in the sitting room. Eamon and I looked to each other, the house settling uneasily around us. It wasn’t Margaret, I thought. Yesterday, she hadn’t knocked.
There was a new tension in the air now, and I could feel it almost right away. Eamon’s hand lifted, gesturing for me to stay quiet. He was watching that shadow, gaze moving to the rifle hanging on the wall.
I pulled my flour-covered hands from the bowl, taking a step backward. “Eamon?” I whispered.
The knock sounded again, rattling the glass window on the door, and he finally moved, leaning to catch a glimpse out the kitchen window.