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.”
Esther came around the butcher block without a word, methodically washing her hands. I could see her thinking as she scrubbed the suds up her arms.
“What does it mean?”
“I don’t know. I told you, this has never happened before. We’ve always crossed on parallel time, but somehow, you’ve found a loophole. Technically, you went somewhere you don’t exist, but it was a place you had once been. There isn’t a rule book for that. Hell, there isn’t a rule book for any of it.”
We stared at each other.
“What if—” My voice turned brittle. “What if the door isn’t going to reappear because I’ve broken it somehow?”
Her forehead wrinkled. “How?”
“I don’t know. But you said that for us, time was a fraying rope, right? Multiple strands. If I’m gaining memories from one life and losing ones from the other, maybe that means that time is mending for me. Maybe it means that I won’t be able to cross a third time.”
It was a theory, one that was based on nothing but my own fear. I was grasping at straws.
Esther wrapped her arms around me, holding me close to her. “We all have to make a choice,” she said softly, “and it’s different for each of us. Yours will be different from mine. From Margaret’s. And Susanna’s.”
“You don’t think she killed herself, do you?” I whispered, asking the question as bluntly as I could. I wasn’t going to dance around things anymore, afraid to disrupt their lives. This had been my life, too. “You think Nathaniel killed Susanna.”
There was no denial in her eyes or in her silence, a slow admission settling on her face. “I told you. There was something about your mother that just wasn’t . . . right. She had no center to her, no inner compass. She was one of those people who was blown by the wind, at the mercy of her feelings and her fears,” she paused. “She wasn’t like you, June. I loved her, but she was weak.”
There was a deep echo of guilt behind the words. On some level, Esther felt responsible.
“I thought she’d done the right thing, sending you back, but there was no going back after that. Truly. It was more than the splitting of time and what it did to her mind. She was ruined in other places we couldn’t see.”
“That sounds to me like someone who might take their own life.” I said.
She smiled sadly. “No. She wasn’t strong enough, even for that, I’m afraid.”
It was such a cruel thing to say, but the love she had for Susanna was evident in her voice. It had been since the first time I’d heard Esther talk about her that way.
“They never found her.” She continued. “She wouldn’t be the first to die at the falls, and it might take days or weeks, but eventually, there’s a body. That part was odd, though not impossible. And when the man who saw her jump was the town minister, no one questioned it.”
If she was right, then the most beloved man in Jasper, the man whose own son called him a cruel bastard, was a murderer. And the only one who seemed to know it was Esther. Probably Eamon, too. What lengths would he have gone to to be sure Annie and I were safe from a man like that?
Esther wasn’t avoiding my gaze anymore, letting me see for the first time what lay within her. Esther Farrow wasn’t just a farmer or a grandmother or a town outcast. This woman was a flame. She was dangerous, too.
The thing she and Eamon had in common was that ferocious protectiveness. If he murdered Nathaniel, maybe she’d helped. It was even possible that they’d planned it together.
“Do you think Eamon did it?” I asked, not mincing words. “Do you think that Eamon killed Nathaniel?”
She knew the answer to that question. I could see it in the wide openness of her eyes.
“I don’t know what happened that night, and I’ve never asked. But that man would have done a lot worse for you,” she said.
That wasn’t a complete answer, but it confirmed what I suspected—that Eamon was capable of killing.