I’m watching over my shoulder, afraid that someone will hear us.
“I need your help,” I say.
Esther’s door opened, making the memory vanish, and I was back on the porch again, standing beside Eamon. The younger Margaret was gone, but the slightly older one stood before me now.
“Morning.” She tucked Annie’s hair behind her ear, letting the door open wider. “What are y’all doin’ here so early?”
Annie ran inside, but Eamon and I didn’t move.
She smiled. “June? You okay?”
“What’s all this?” Esther appeared in the hallway behind her, her hair long over her shoulder. She was missing her apron, too.
“It was you,” I said, gaze still pinned on Margaret. “Wasn’t it?”
Margaret gave a confused laugh. “What?”
“I came to you.” I pulled the memory back to the front of my mind. “I told you I needed your help.”
The smile on her face faltered then.
Esther looked between us. “Help with what? What are you talking about?”
I stared at Margaret. “What did you do?”
“Margaret?” Esther prodded.
Margaret was wringing her hands now, bottom lip trembling as she shot a glance at Eamon.
I took a measured step toward her. “You knew all this time.”
“I can’t.” Her voice scraped. “I promised I wouldn’t.”
“Tell me!” I took hold of her arms, squeezing.
“I promised you!” she cried, tearing away from me.
I let her go, and she stumbled into the porch railing, catching herself. She looked at the three of us with wide, glassy eyes.
“I’m not supposed to say anything. Not until you choose.”
“I gave you the photograph, didn’t I? The envelope with the bluebell?” I said it out loud as it dawned on me.
Her red face was streaked with tears now, her hair falling from its braid.
“Margaret,” I said, more gently. “Tell me.”
When Annie appeared in the doorway, Esther shooed her back into the house. Then she came outside and closed the door.
Margaret wiped her face. “You said you had an idea about how to—” She stopped herself.
“It’s all right, honey.” Esther rubbed her back, smoothing her braid. “Take your time.”
“You had an idea about how to make it so Annie wouldn’t ever get sick, but you couldn’t tell Eamon because he wouldn’t understand. You said he’d stop you from doing what you had to do. You begged me.”
I could see it. I could almost hear my own voice saying the words. The memory was trickling in now. Margaret whispering. The slam of a door somewhere.
“You told me to keep the letter and the photograph safe. For a long time. I’m supposed to give them to you in 2022 so that you’ll come back here.”
I shook my head. “Why didn’t you just tell me? Why not just explain?”
Now I was asking her to account for things she hadn’t yet done. That wasn’t fair. I knew it wasn’t, but I also couldn’t make sense of this.
“You said that you couldn’t know anything until the right time. If you did, it could change things. Set things off course. I’m not supposed to tell you anything until you started to remember.”
My mind raced, trying to match the timeline with the one that would play out more than seventy years from now.
“But then so much time went by that . . .” Her voice broke. “I thought maybe I’d messed it up, somehow.”
“What exactly did I tell you to do, Margaret?”
“I’m supposed to give you the locket and the other things you gave me. You told me to set the locket to 1951, not before, so that you wouldn’t risk returning to a time where you were still here.”
You cannot go where you already exist.
That was one of the rules.
I’d kept the hallucinations from Gran and Birdie for nearly a year. What Margaret couldn’t have known was when she would die. Mailing the photograph might have been her last-ditch effort. Her Hail Mary, hoping it would start the chain of events before it was too late.
All of this was my doing.
“Where did I go when I left, Margaret?”
She stared at her shoes, wiping her nose with her sleeve.
“It’s done now. I’m here. There’s no reason to keep it from me.”
She sniffed. “I need a piece of paper.”
Esther opened the door, and we followed Margaret inside. She took a piece of paper from the desk drawer in the sitting room and sat down, with us peering over her shoulder. We watched as she drew two waving, intertwined lines that looked eerily similar to the ones I’d imagined when I was trying to explain it to Eamon.
He glanced up at me, thinking the same thing.
“This is the Farrow line. Two woven times.” Margaret’s face was still swollen, but she was calm now. Focused. She put an X at the right end of the rope and wrote 1950 above it. “This is where it becomes one timeline.”
“I don’t understand.”
From the X, she drew a single straight line. “When you left, you sent yourself to a place on the timeline that overlaps your life here. You thought that would make it so there was only one time.”
“This is insane,” Eamon muttered, his irritation not hidden.
“We made the plan, and you were going to do it the next time you saw the door. But then that night at the Midsummer Faire . . .” Her mouth twisted. “I tried to convince you to wait until things had died down, but you were worried that if Caleb found out the truth about that night, you’d be arrested. If that happened, you wouldn’t be able to cross like you planned.”
We were all quiet, waiting.
“The next time the door appeared, you left.”
“Okay, but where did I go, Margaret?”
She bit her bottom lip. “To 2022.”
Esther’s eyes went wide.
Margaret didn’t drop her gaze from mine. “You went to a place you already exist.”
I shook my head. “So I’m . . . gone.”
If there couldn’t be two of me, then I had to be. But this, what she was saying, that meant that I’d willingly ended my own timeline. My own life.
“What do you mean, gone?” Eamon’s voice was barely audible.
Beside me, Esther pressed a hand to her mouth.
“I killed myself?” I said it out loud.
“No.” Margaret’s eyes widened. “You found a loophole. That’s all.”
My eyes narrowed on her. That was the word Esther had used.
“But what if it didn’t work? What if I was wrong about all of it?”
“You weren’t,” she said. “It’s already working.”
“What do you mean?”
She pointed to the straight, single line on the page before she picked up the pen. She continued the line by branching it into two that didn’t intertwine.
“There’s only one timeline now. This one and the one on the other side of the door. They can’t exist together anymore because you ended the fray. That’s why you’re losing memories.”
I hadn’t told Margaret that.
“That’s what’s happening right? You’re losing memories?”