I’m standing beneath a willow tree, cool grass beneath my feet. Before me, a tortoiseshell button on Eamon’s shirt comes sharply into focus. I’m staring into his chest, but then my eyes find his.
I’m wearing the dress. I can see two tiny pink flower petals caught in the lace below my shoulder, and I know they’ve fallen from the woven crown that Margaret made for me to wear.
“For as long as we both shall live.” The words drip from my mouth in a softness that echoes the sting of tears I feel behind my eyes.
Eamon’s mouth lifts just the slightest bit, a tiny smile meant only for me. “For as long as we both shall live,” he says.
He doesn’t wait to be told that he can kiss me. He just pulls me toward him, and his hand slides around my ribs, down the center of my back, so that he can hold me against him. Once I’m fully enveloped in his arms, he moves his face close. Our noses touch before his lips part on mine, and he kisses me deeply, every single atom in my body like blinking Christmas lights.
It’s not a vision. This is an embedded, sleeping beast that’s been waiting to wake. My head is filling with it, forming a map of memories that stretch and connect.
For the first time, I can feel a tether. It stretches tight between me and this man.
Eamon’s fingers slide around my neck, finding the nape of my hair. His thumb presses to my cheek, just above the edges of the red birthmark that stains my skin.
And then it was gone, snuffed out from the world around me, but I could still see it in my mind’s eye. I could recall it in perfect detail.
I’d been able to smell the honeysuckle in the air and feel the give of the earth beneath my bare feet. And it hadn’t been like the jarring, head-splitting episodes that I’d had before I came here. This was as smooth as slipping into cool, still water.
The wind picked up outside, making the house creak around me, and a soft cry echoed on the other side of the wall. After a few seconds of silence, it sounded again.
Annie.
It was followed by the creak of the sofa as Eamon got to his feet. The pop of the floorboards as he crossed the sitting room. I followed the sounds, moving along the length of the wall with my fingertips trailing the wallpaper.
I could hear Eamon climb into bed with her the same way he had every night since I’d been here, a predictable pattern.
I met my own eyes in the mirror, still feeling the sting on my lips where Eamon’s mouth had pressed to mine in the memory. They were a pale silver in the lamplight, shifting with the shadows in the room. And before I could see my mother there, looking back at me, I turned out the light.
Twenty
That morning was different.
Eamon and I moved like planets around each other in the kitchen, the smoke from the cast iron making the light hazy and the air rich with the smell of bacon. Annie was sitting on top of the table with a bowl of black cherries, bare feet dangling over the wood floor.
There was a sudden ease in the house, like an unclenched fist, and I wondered if it was because more of the truth had worked its way out between us. Eamon had let me see what lay behind that clenched jaw and those pensive eyes. I hadn’t been able to tell if he’d meant to do it, or if it had just happened, but he hadn’t hidden that pain from me when he had the chance.
My life ended when you left.
The echo of it inside of me made me shudder.
He handed me a bowl without looking in my direction, but instead of an attempt to avoid me, it appeared to be more a movement that was done by memory. It felt like a lived-in thing. Was this how we’d looked, standing side by side in the kitchen as the sun rose each morning? Was this our rhythm?
He reached over my head for two mugs, and for once, I didn’t lean away from him when he got close to me. I could smell that summer scent, sun-warmed wood and grass. I found myself inhaling before he pulled away, and it lit on my tongue in a way that didn’t feel new anymore.
He poured the coffee with one hand, a distracted look on his face as he pushed the bacon around in the pan with the other. Without any apparent thought, he set the spatula down and moved the sugar bowl toward him. I watched as he opened it, scooping two spoonfuls into one of the cups. The cup closest to me.
I stared at it as he turned his attention back to the sizzling pan. Two spoonfuls of sugar. That was how I’d always taken my coffee, and he knew it. But there was no evidence on his face that he was even aware of what he’d done. It had been a mindless movement, a pattern that was familiar to him, with me standing in the kitchen at his side.
My hands curled around the mug, sliding it toward me. The heat burning against my palms was also waking along the crests of my cheeks. He knew me. I was still trying to wrap my head around that.
He knew me.
The same questions replayed over and over in my head. Why had I left this? How had I left this? How could I have just walked away?
I was only just beginning to think of those choices as my own. In some ways, maybe it wasn’t true, but with each passing day, I found it harder to separate myself from the June who’d lived here.
I looked across the room to the rifle that was hanging on the wall. I’d spent the night thinking about what Caleb had said and that look on Eamon’s face in the police station. If he was afraid that Nathaniel would hurt me, would he have killed him? Was he even capable of that? I didn’t know.
I’d thought more than once about the episode I’d had in my bathroom the morning I thought I had seen blood beneath my fingernails. I remembered that ribbon of red in the water, the smell of it in the air. I could see that flash of memory that had found me in the police station, the sound of myself gasping as I ran through the field.
And I’d felt that soul-deep love in the memory I’d experienced last night. If I knew Eamon had killed someone, would I have covered for him, like Caleb said?
Eamon pulled on his overshirt, stretching his stiff shoulder as he glanced out the window, toward the barn. He started toward the door, pulling the collar up around his chin.
I hadn’t said anything, but I’d been watching the color change in the field, marking the difference by the day. From the look of the tobacco, the blight was spreading. Slowly, but it was. I wasn’t sure the crop would make it. Not at this rate.
“I could help,” I said, chancing a look over my coffee cup.
He stopped, holding the back door open.
“I know how to irrigate the field and trim the infected stalks without contaminating the others.”
“I know you do.”
I stared at him. Of course he did.
“Margaret will be here soon to look after Annie.” He changed the subject. “The Faire’s tonight, so she’ll be here until the afternoon.”
He looked away from me, as if that would soften the meaning of the words. Each morning, he never disappeared into the fields until Margaret had arrived. And he wouldn’t stay out there if I was the only one at the house with Annie. The last time he’d done that, I’d left her.
I cleared my throat, trying to loosen the thick feeling there. “I think we should go. To the Faire, I mean.”
He stared at me. “I don’t think so.”
“There were people on the street who saw me go into the police station yesterday. If we’re the only ones in town who aren’t there, which we would be, then it’s going to look like we have something to hide.”