Page 106 of The Unmaking of June Farrow

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 like a rope. It was eerily similar to the one 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 becomesonetimeline.”

“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, butwheredid 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?”

Esther looked at me.

“So, what? I’m just going to lose my entire life?”