“I don’t know what I thought.”
“There had to be a reason you made me promise. What was it?”
Eamon stared at the paper on the table, arms crossed over his chest.
“It started when you found out you were pregnant,” he began. “You didn’t want children because you knew you would have a daughter and that she would go through what you had. So, when we got married, we agreed. But things didn’t go as planned. I thought you wouldn’t want to have the baby, but you did.”
This changes everything.
The words floated to the surface of my thoughts. I could hear my own voice saying them.
“You changed your mind because you wanted her. And then, when she was born, you became so focused on breaking this . . .” He searched for the word. “Curse. You wouldn’t accept that you couldn’t fix it.”
This changes everything. You know that, right?
“This is what Esther was talking about,” I said, remembering. “When she said that this is how it all started last time?”
He nodded. “The more time that went by, the more obsessed you became. You were coming up with all kinds of theories on how to keep Annie from getting sick, and some of them involved trying to go back through the door. I was worried. We all were. You weren’t well, and I was afraid that you were going to do something dangerous.”
Maybe I had, I thought.
You weren’t well.
That’s what Esther had said about Susanna.
“You think that’s what happened, don’t you?” I guessed. “You think I tried to break the curse and failed.”
“Even if you did,” He paused. “That doesn’t answer the question of where you went.”
“No, but it answers the question of why.” I looked up at him.
As soon as I thought it, the cold, biting reality sank in. There was nothing to find because this trail of breadcrumbs led nowhere. By the time I went through that door, my mind could have been gone in the way Susanna’s was before she died. Maybe I’d already lost myself completely.
I stared into space, that sickening feeling in my gut making my heart kick up again. For the first time, it was sinking in that somewhere in time, I was gone. Really gone. The thought made me feel the frost-laced breath of death on my skin.
I stood up from the table, a little too quickly, and the pencil rolled, hitting the floor. I needed to breathe. To pull air into my lungs and feel the wind on my face. I needed to get out of here.
I went through the open back door and down the steps, pushing my hands into my hair. I was too cold now, even with the humid summer heat, a chill aching deep in the center of my bones. The earth was spinning, and I could feel it, the motion of the entire planet swirling and making my head spin.
I’d been trying to understand how I could have left Annie, but I hadn’t considered that she was the reason why. I’d broken vows for her. Ones I’d made to myself and ones I’d made to Eamon. There was nothing that could have prepared me for a love like that, to sit and watch a dying thing grow. The fate of the Farrows was Annie’s fate, too. Maybe I’d risked everything to change it.
I turned in a circle, scanning the edge of the field for her, but she wasn’t there.
“Annie?” I called out, lifting a hand over my eyes to block the sun. She wasn’t outside the barn or at the paddock fence, either.
“Annie!” I walked toward the garden, leaning over the fence, but it was empty.
Eamon came down the back steps, watching me.
“Where is she? Did she come in the house?”
“No.” His eyes were on the road now, tracing the edges of the farm.
My steps quickened as I headed for the barn, and I yanked the heavy sliding door open, ignoring Callie’s insistent reach over the fence.
“Annie?” I stepped inside, looking for her. “Annie!”
The stalls and the hayloft were silent.
When I came out of the barn, Eamon was jogging toward me from the house.
“She’s not in there,” I panted, my voice getting frantic now.
Eamon cupped his hands around his mouth. “Annie!” His deep voice carried over the fields, farther than mine could travel. We both stood frozen, listening.
“Where is she?” I studied the road. Had I seen a car pass by? “Eamon, where is she?”
My hand gripped onto his sleeve so tightly that pain pierced through the bones in my fingers. I couldn’t feel my heartbeat anymore.
“What about the river?” It was in the distance, beyond the tree line that sat behind the hill.
He shook his head. “She wouldn’t wander that far.”
The entire look of his face had transfigured, a look of pure terror consuming him. We were asking ourselves the same question. Only last night, Caleb Rutherford had broken into our home. He’d threatened me. Us.
Eamon pushed me in the other direction, hand pointing to the northeast corner of the fields. “Start on that side, I’ll go this way.”
I ran, legs driving me forward until I was disappearing into the farthest row of tobacco. “Annie!” My voice cracked as I flew through the fluttering leaves. “Annie!”
The panic sent my thoughts scattering in every direction, but I couldn’t follow them. Eamon’s voice was ringing out in the distance, growing more desperate every time he shouted her name. Each time I heard it, the chill deepened in my blood.
I didn’t slow as I reached the end of the row, and then I was doubling back on the next, eyes searching the field. My throat was raw as I called for her again and again.
“Mama!” A tiny voice found me.
I stopped, catching myself on the stalks before I could stumble forward. I held my breath as I listened. Eamon was still calling out, the sound muffled by the wind. Had I imagined it?
“Mama!”
The pain of hearing that word detonated inside of me, making everything tilt and shift.
“Annie?” I took a step in the direction of the voice, then another.
“Mama! Look!”
I pressed myself between the plants, into the next row, then the next, looking for her. When I spotted her pink dress in the forest of green, a sob broke in my chest. She was so small beneath the height of the tobacco, standing in the center of the row. Her brown eyes were wide with excitement, her hands cupped together in front of her.
“Eamon! She’s here!”
I walked straight toward her, hardly able to stay on my feet. My insides collapsed as my knees hit the dirt in front of her. I hadn’t realized I was crying, hot tears dripping from my chin.
I wrapped my arms around her, pulling her into my lap. My face pressed into her hair as I wept.
“Look,” she whispered, her hands opening between us to reveal a ladybug.
It crawled across her palm, the vision of it blurring through my tears.
“I see it,” I rasped, wiping my face with the back of my hand.
Eamon burst into the row a second later, chest deflating when he saw us. His face was flushed, the center of his shirt darkening with sweat. He sank down, pulling us both into him, and I curled into Eamon as Annie curled into me. She peered at the ladybug, oblivious to the two minutes of horror we’d just gone through.
I didn’t care that this crossed the line of keeping my distance or confusing boundaries. In that moment, I needed there to be no space between the three of us. I needed to feel us together, with no beginning and no end.