Page 102 of The Unmaking of June Farrow

“He followed us. He tried to—” My whole body shakes with a silent cry. “He tried to drown me in the river.”

Eamon is suddenly so still that it doesn’t look like he’s breathing. He’s staring at the center of my chest, hands still holding on to me. When his eyes finally lift, the panic in them is gone.

“Listen to me,” he says.

I double over, crying again.

“June,” he says, more firmly. “Take a breath.”

I swallow, trying to do as he says. I’m shaking so badly.

“Tell me exactly where he is.”

I try to think. “At the bend before the footbridge. He’s down by the water.”

Eamon stands, going to the stove, and I hear him light it. Then he’s propping open the back door and hauling in the two buckets of water from outside. I watch in a daze as he dumps them into the small tub beside Annie’s nook.

The kettle is beginning to hum when he fetches Annie’s stained dress from outside and pulls the remaining ribbon from her hair. He takes her stockings, her shoes. Then he does the same to me, gently helping me out of the dress until I’m sitting naked on the chair.

I can’t move. I can’t even ask what he’s doing, but I realize once the fire is going and he throws our clothes into it. That’s when I finally notice my hands. The blood caked beneath my fingernails.

I move to the sink robotically, turning on the tap and shoving my hands beneath the water. I scrub violently, watching the ribbon of red circle the drain.

The kettle squeals, and Eamon pours it into the tub before he comes back for me. I wrap my arms around his neck and he lifts me, lowering me into it. He’s setting Annie into my arms next, and the water sloshes over the side as she burrows into me. She’s not crying anymore. Neither am I.

“If anyone knocks on that door, you tell them I’ve gone to help Esther with her truck. You get her cleaned up. Put her to bed.”

I think I nod.

“June? Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

He brushes a hand over Annie’s head and kisses me, but his lips linger on my forehead just a little longer than usual. Then he’s walking across the sitting room. He’s disappearing out the back door.

The only sound is the crackle of the fire as I stare into the flames, watching my dress burn.

The night played out in my head one frame at a time. The wood plank fence that stretched along the flower fields. The aching cold in my hands as I stood over Nathaniel’s body. The fireflies blinking in the dark as I ran. The clearest part of the entire thing was the sight of those clothes burning in the fireplace. I could almost smell them, even now.

“When I got to the river, it was dark,” Eamon began. “I didn’t see anyone on the road, but I kept my light off anyway, just to be safe. No one saw me.”

I stood before the bedroom window, watching Callie graze in the paddock.

“I found him right where you told me he’d be—at the bend before the footbridge.” Eamon appeared at the corner of my vision as he leaned into the wall beside the window. “I could tell by looking at him that it would be suspicious. There were marks on his arms, his face. I think maybe from when you were…” He couldn’t finish. “If someone found him like that, there would be questions. So, I decided to drag him downriver and send his body over the falls so that it would looklike an accident. Maybe he’d had too much to drink at the Faire, or maybe he’d slipped and fell. There’d been a lot of rain that week, so the river was high. The current was strong.”

So, Eamon wasn’t a killer, but he wasn’t innocent, either. We’d done this thing together.

“I put him into the water, and I thought I was close enough to the drop to be safe. It was so dark that it was hard to see, and I didn’t realize there was a fallen tree up the bank. He got caught downstream, and at first light, he was spotted by a fisherman.”

I tried not to imagine Nathaniel’s pale, tangled body half-submerged in the water.

“Sam came by late that night after they’d gotten the message that Mimi Granger had left at the sheriff’s office. Luckily, I was already back, and we told him we’d been home all night. “But then people came forward saying they’d seen me arguing with Nathaniel in the weeks leading up to his death. Then when it got out that Mimi Granger had seen you that night, it drew even more attention.”

I closed my eyes, seeing it. Hearing it. My labored breaths as I tore through the sea of waist-high alfalfa, Annie in my arms. The pain in my foot from losing my shoe—the same shoe Mimi had found in her tedder, months later.

“No one had any reason to believe it. I don’t think they were even seriously considering what Mimi said until you left. The timing was suspicious, and the investigation went on, but no one could get ahold of you. When you didn’t come back, they started asking more questions.”

“Why didn’t we go to the police? Why didn’t we just tell the truth?”