Page 112 of The Unmaking of June Farrow

“They didn’t find her body because he buried her.”

His lips parted, his eyebrows coming together. “What?” If he was lying now, it was convincing.

“Nathaniel told me. Right before he tried to drown me in the river.”

His chest rose on a sharp inhalation of breath. This, I could tell, was the thing he really needed to know.

“Yes,” I answered. “I killed him.”

The gun went off, the sound exploding in my ears, and it echoed into the hills. I waited for an eruption of pain in my chest. My stomach. But when I looked down, there was no bloom of red. He’d fired the gun, but he hadn’t shot me.

Slowly, my eyes lifted. Tears glimmered in Caleb’s eyes as he stared at me, and I didn’t know if they were for Nathaniel or for Susanna. Only one of them deserved any kind of pity.

“He held me under the water.” My voice broke. “He held me there while my daughter watched from the riverbank.”

He believed me. It was etched deep in the lines of his face. The tears brimming in his eyes finally spilled over, but his face didn’t change. He stood there, freed from the lie he’d been telling himself for his entire life. He’d been a child who believed the story he’d been told because he needed to survive. Now it was time to let that story go.

“You’ll find our mother buried under the oak tree at the corner of the woods beside the falls. She deserves a grave, Caleb.”

He moved to reach for his belt, and I flinched, drawing my cuffedhands back to my chest. But he hooked one finger into a small set of keys and tossed them to the ground, turning his back to me. I watched, completely numb, as he got into the car. Stood there frozen as it pulled onto the road.

Leaflets of paper flew out the driver’s side window as he took off, fluttering in the air before they floated to the ground. I walked toward them as they scattered in the road, stopping short when I looked down at the one beside my feet.

It was the photograph. Nathaniel’s sharp-edged form. That cigarette in his hand. My mother, face turned as she smiled at him. She’d had no idea what that sinister love would set into motion.

It comes on an ordinary day, at an ordinary hour, and the moment I feel it, my whole world stops.

That buzz in the air is one I know. I can feel it reach into the house, wrapping its tendrils around me.

The door.

Moonlight is cast across the wall of the sitting room, making everything look black-and-white. I see myself in the reflection of the kitchen window, the strap of my nightgown slipping from my shoulder. I’m standing over the stove, where the kettle is whirring, my blond hair hanging in a braid that almost reaches my waist.

Not now.

This isn’t how it’s supposed to go.

I meet my own eyes, letting myself paint that image in my mind. Me. In this home. A mother. A wife. I’ve prepared for this, but I still have to press my hand over my mouth to muffle the sound that breaks in my chest. I have to breathe through it so that I don’t wake her.

Through the open door of my bedroom, Annie is asleep beneath my quilts. I can hear her breathing.

The burn in my throat is nothing to the pain behind my ribs as my feettake me across the kitchen. She is bathed in blue light, her hair like silver. She’s asleep, I tell myself. Eamon will be home any minute. She won’t wake. She won’t even stir.

I have no choice but to hope it’s true.

It’s been almost eighteen months since I last saw the door, and every day that passes is a day that Caleb Rutherford could discover the truth. It’s only a matter of time before it finds its way into the light. When it does, I’ll have lost my chance.

I step into the room, rounding the bed. Annie’s cheeks frame a perfect pink mouth, and I press my lips to her temple. I inhale her scent as deep as I possibly can.

There isn’t time to second-guess it or wait for Eamon’s headlights on the road. My feet take me to the dressing table, and I pull the ring from my finger. I drop it into the dish below the mirror and remember the words I wrote on that envelope—a message that will be carried through time, back to me.

Trust me.

I hope that I will.

I open the back door, not bothering to wrap a shawl around my shoulders or take the lantern with me. The tobacco fields are so thick that the wind makes the leaves look like dark water in the moonlight. That vibration on the wind is even more alive out here, and I follow it into the nearest row. The plants swallow me up, my bare feet sinking in the soft, damp soil, and I walk, hands catching the leaves as I pass.

I see it a few paces later. The chipped red paint. The shimmer that surrounds it in the air.