“Eamon!”
The sound of the rifle cocking echoed out in the night just as Caleb reached his car, parked up the road. The sound of the shot tore through the silence, and then Eamon was cocking it again, setting the gun against his shoulder and taking aim.
The headlights of Caleb’s car illuminated, the engine roaring to life just as I reached Eamon, and I took hold of his arm. But the gun fired again, making me recoil when the sound exploded.
I shoved into him, forcing the gun down, and Eamon watched, his face contorted with rage, as Caleb drove away.
“What are you doing?” I screamed.
Eamon pushed past me, back toward the house, and I caught him by the wrist. “Eamon!”
He didn’t answer, tucking the gun beneath his arm and pulling free of my grasp.
“Stop!” I followed him inside, but he didn’t return the rifle to the wall. Instead, he took the truck keys from the hook.
I tore them from his hand, holding them away from him. “Eamon, stop.”
Finally, his eyes locked with mine, and he went still long enough for me to set my hand on the center of his heaving chest. He was coming back into himself now, his breaths slowing.
When he didn’t move, I reached for the gun, and he let me take it. I moved slowly, hanging it back on the wall, and staring at the gleam of light the lantern painted on its barrel.
The trembling was starting, finding my hands first. There was no doubt in my mind, when I looked at him, what he would have done. He would have killed that man right there on the road. He was ready to do it.
I blinked, forcing myself to turn back to the house. The contents of the room were toppled, drawers opened and papers littering the ground.
“What was he looking for?”
Eamon didn’t answer.
“Is there anything he could have found?” I said, warily. “Anything at all? Evidence?”
He leveled his gaze at me before he shook his head once.
My heart sank. Was this an unspoken confession?
“You’re sure?” I whispered.
“Everything’s gone.” His deep voice made the trembling in my hands deepen.
I pinched my eyes closed, my head splitting with pain. The smell of smoke was in the air again, but this time, it was different. I could see the lick of flames. Feel the heat of them. But the fireplace was cold. It was another memory, skimming the borders of my mind. It was too far away. Too fractured.
“I talked to Caleb at the Midsummer Faire.” I closed my eyes, pressing a hand to my head. “I should have told you.”
“What?”
“He threatened me.”
“Threatened you how?” Eamon’s voice was even, but it had taken on a new tone. One that scared me.
“He said that we’re going to pay. That he’s going to find proof that we’re lying.” I pushed through the door to the bedroom, trying to breathe as I searched the room around me.
Everything was scattered, the entire bedroom tossed and ripped apart. Clothes covered the floor, wardrobe emptied. The pages of the books that had been on the shelf were ripped from their spines. The wind poured through the open window, catching their edges, and they looked like the petals of a flower torn from the stem.
I went to the bed, using both hands to shift the mattress down before I reached behind it, searching for the burlap fold I’d hidden there. The newspaper clippings. The photograph. The page with the years I’d written down. But my hand found nothing.
They were gone.
Twenty-Five
I picked up the crumpled wedding dress, smoothing the white lace beneath my palm. The fabric looked like it was intact, but there was a smudge of dirt along the bodice, where it had been stepped on.
Eamon’s hammer echoed through the house as he drove a nail into the doorjamb. The loose hinge of the screen had come out when Caleb and Eamon barreled outside, leaving it hanging. We’d spent the day putting things back together to mimic some semblance of normality, though the disturbing feeling that someone had been in here still lingered in the air.
I’d already collected what couldn’t be saved—a broken perfume bottle, torn papers, the bedside table that had toppled over and cracked a leg. The last of the mess was the clothes that had been taken from the wardrobe and the quilts stripped from the bed.
This was what Eamon had meant about things getting out of hand. Caleb was hell-bent, so fixated on us that he’d been willing to break the law to get what he needed. He was a man on the verge of becoming unhinged, making me think that Esther had been right about him. He may have hated his father, but he still had Nathaniel’s blood running through his veins.
I hung up the dress, my eyes following Annie through the bedroom window. She was walking the edge of the field, tapping the wide, flat leaves of tobacco with her hands as she made her way to the house.
Eamon came inside, and I met him in the kitchen, leaning into the wall beside the back door. We’d been like that all day, quiet and not wanting to say out loud what we were thinking. Things were catching up to us, and Eamon and I were one thing. Annie was another.
“The articles and the photograph don’t prove anything other than the fact that we were interested.” He said. “There have to be dozens of people in Jasper who kept those same clippings. But the years that were written down, you don’t know what they mean?”
“I’m pretty sure they correspond with crossings.”
He tore a sheet from the notepad on the counter and set it onto the table before he found a pencil and handed it to me. “Do you remember them?” he asked.
I nodded, taking a seat before I wrote the years out in the same order they’d been on the paper that Caleb took.
1912
1946
1950
1951
Before what happened last night, I hadn’t told him about the things I’d found in the bedroom, because I wasn’t sure what they meant or if I’d had a reason for hiding them from him in the first place. But we were beyond that now. Eamon and I were going to have to find a way to be honest with each other if we were going to keep things from burning down.
He came to stand beside me, close enough to conjure to life the lantern-lit moment in the barn when he’d kissed me. I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it.
He set both hands on the table, studying the numbers.
I kept writing, annotating the years.
1912—Esther brings June to 1989 （age 7 months）
1946—June （age 35） arrives
1950—June （age 39） leaves
Eamon was quiet as I tried to work it out.
I set the tip of the pencil back down on the paper, filling it in.
1951—June （age 34） returns
“This is the one that doesn’t make sense. Why would I write down a year in the future?”
“Maybe you were planning to come back.”
I shook my head. “1950 was my third time to cross, which means I knew I couldn’t go back through the door.”
“Well, in a way, you did come back.”
That’s what worried me—the five-year overlap, or loophole, as Esther had called it.
I closed my eyes, running over every piece of the puzzle I had. There was something about all of this that felt planned, like Eamon said.
“You said before that I promised you I wouldn’t go back through the door? Is that because you thought I was going to?”