Page 43 of The Unmaking of June Farrow

“You need to attract as little attention as possible while you’re here, and people will expect you to be at home with Eamon. Once you’re gone, we’ll figure out something to tell them.”

“Why are they so interested? Why do they care?”

“You’ve come at a…complicatedtime.” She said that word again.

She crossed the kitchen, going back to the sink. She was avoiding my gaze now.

“Are you going to tell me about that little girl?” I barely got the words out.

Esther stiffened just a little. “She’s Eamon’s daughter.”

The words felt intentionally incomplete. Did that mean she wasn’t mine, or that she was, but that I had no claim to her?

A creak popped overhead, and we both looked up to the milk-glass pendant light hanging over the table. The sound traveled across the ceiling until it reached the stairs. A moment later, a young woman was coming around the banister, one hand still struggling to tuck the tail of her blouse into her skirt. She nearly tripped over her own feet when she saw me.

Wide blue eyes the color of storm clouds fixed on me, a blush reaching her freckled cheeks. “June.” She breathed my name, and even now, here, over seventy years away, it sounded the same.

Margaret Anne Farrow, the same one I’d buried only days ago, stood steps away.

Gran.Living. Breathing.

A smile broke on her lips, and she walked straight toward me, throwing her arms around my shoulders and squeezing hard. She was shorter than me. Thin and narrow. But it was her. The prick behind my eyes was now a painful burn, and when I inhaled the smell of her, an ache bloomed in my throat.

Without even meaning to, I leaned into her, holding on so tightly that a broken sound escaped me. I was instantly that little girl again, crying into her shoulder. After the last twenty-four hours, with every inch of reality shifting beneath me, she felt like solid, unbreakable ground.

She pulled back to look at me again, her eyes bright with amazement. There was a girlish smile on her lips and a sun-kissed pink that colored her cheeks. She wasn’t a woman at all, a girl more than anything else. She couldn’t be older than sixteen or seventeen years old.But behind her eyes and in the air around her I could sense Gran. I could feel her. The woman who’d raised me. Who’d kept me.

I swallowed against the pain in my chest when the memory of standing on that hill for the burial flashed through my mind. Having her right in front of me, warm to the touch, made that ache of losing her tear back open.

There was a knowing in the look that painted Esther’s face now. A solemn understanding. She knew that in my world, my time, this girl was already gone. She’d had to have known that the last time I came here.

“There’s work to do, Margaret.”

Margaret’s hands slipped from the sleeves of my shirt, a protest already brewing on her tongue. “But—”

Esther fixed her with her stare, and Margaret’s mouth snapped shut.

“We’re on sunnies today,” Esther said, using the sunflower nickname I’d only ever heard Gran use. “The delphinium we’ll cut tomorrow. It’s all going to town for the Faire.”

The Midsummer Faire.

I glanced to the calendar again. The summer solstice was labeled in red type on June 21, four days from now. With any luck, I’d be gone by then.

Margaret’s lips pursed defiantly, but she obeyed, giving me one last look before she headed to the back door. The screen slammed behind her.

Esther’s fair eyes sharpened on me. “Be careful. Best not to let her get too attached before you leave for good.”

I watched Margaret’s shape grow smaller through the window before she disappeared behind the fence.

“Eamon’s not the only one who was left with a broken heart. Understand?”

I didn’t know if she was talking only about Margaret or if she was including herself in that statement. If she did have some kind ofaffection for me, then she was good at hiding it. I’d felt little, if any, tenderness from her since I walked through the door.

If what they said was true, I couldn’t blame her. There were years of history between all of us, and it had ended with betrayal. Even if she was the only one who remembered it.

“I’ve got some things you can wear. You’ll have to give me those clothes. Anything else you brought with you that shouldn’t be here?” she asked.

I shook my head. I’d left everything in the truck.