Page 71 of The Unmaking of June Farrow

She unbuttoned the collar of her shirt, opening it to the cool breeze. I could see her mind turning with the words before she finally started speaking. “She didn’t leave you, June. She didn’t have a choice.”

I could feel the warmth bleeding from my skin suddenly, the air around me like hard, jagged ice. Esther’s eyes were on the ground between us, her silver-streaked hair unraveling from its bun.

“I told you, there was something about Nathaniel that wasn’t right. His mind was twisted. From the beginning, he knew that Susanna was different somehow, that she was something unnatural. But he couldn’t resist her.” She paused. “He thought she was touched by demons, or some other ridiculous thing his father preached about on Sundays. I think, in a way, he both loved and hated her at the same time. He thought she had some kind of hold over him and that God was testing his faith. But he couldn’t give her up, so he decided he wanted tosaveher, to fix things so that he could have her and still keep his own salvation. She was baptized in the church, and not long after, they found out she was pregnant.”

Beside me, Eamon was silent. He knew what came next.

“Nathaniel came to see me. He was desperate. Scared. Terrified his father would find out.” Esther paused. “He offered me two hundred dollars to poison Susanna in order to kill the child growing inside of her.”

“He wanted you tokillher?”

“Not her,” she said. “You.”

My stomach turned on itself, the photograph of Nathaniel resurfacing in my mind.

“A witch to do the devil’s work,” she muttered. “But the only devil in this town was Nathaniel Rutherford. He figured I wouldn’t want Susanna to have a baby any more than he did. So, he asked me to intervene before people could find out that the minister’s son had gotten a girl pregnant. And not just any girl. A Farrow.”

I stared at her, speechless.

“I didn’t tell Susanna what he’d asked me to do, but I convinced her to go back to her own time because she wasn’t safe with him. I could see when I said it that she knew it was true. For all of Susanna’s faults, she wasn’t blind. She’d already seen that darkness in him. I don’t know if it was because she had you to think about or if she’d already been considering it, but she went through the door the next time it appeared.”

That was when Susanna showed up in Jasper, I thought. After she’dbeen missing for months, she’d come home pregnant with a baby no one could explain.

“It wasn’t long before she came back through that door, and I’ll never understand why she did it. I think in her mind, she thought that she could fix him, the way he thought he could fix her. And that was it. She’d made her choice, and there was no going back.”

“She’d crossed three times,” I murmured. The first time, when she’d come here and met Nathaniel; the second, when she returned to Gran pregnant. The third crossing was her last, when she came back and had me.

Esther nodded. “There was no hiding that she was pregnant, and Nathaniel’s father wasn’t kind or forgiving about it. They didn’t approve of her—him or the town—but they couldn’t turn her away. Not when the whole of Jasper was watching. After a few sermons about the prodigal son and forgiveness, they gave in. Nathaniel married her right away, and a few weeks later, his father died of a heart attack right there in the church. Nathaniel was convinced it was God’s punishment for what he’d done, falling in love with a cursed soul and giving in to temptation. He truly believed she’d brought it upon them.”

“Did he know? About the door?” I asked.

“No. She had enough sense not to tell him, but like I said, he knew she was different. He could sense it, and it played right into all those Bible stories he knew. I think in his own twisted way, he loved her. But he was also terrified of her, and he was consumed with guilt over his father.”

A car passed on the road, making her go quiet. When it was out of sight, she started again.

“When you were born, Nathaniel just couldn’t let it go. He was so fixated on the idea that he’d brought a tainted child into the world, that you had been conceived in sin. Susanna finally seemed to accept it then. She was afraid of him. Afraid of what he might do to you. I hadn’t seen her in months because he’d forbidden her to have any connection with us, saying that she was a part ofhisfamily now. So,when she showed up that night, I didn’t know what to make of it. Nathaniel was in Charlotte for weeks, meeting with the Presbyterian Regional Assembly, and she’d waited until he would be gone.” She finally looked at me. “She asked me to help her.”

“How?” I whispered.

“The door would no longer open for Susanna, so she asked me to take you to the other side. We waited for the door to appear, and when Nathaniel got back from Charlotte, she told him you were dead. That you died in your sleep and we’d buried you. I wasn’t sure he would believe her, but he did. At least, he wanted to, thinking God had finally acted to make things right. She was pregnant with Caleb not too long after.”

I pressed a hand to my mouth, trying to understand it.

“Caleb was born, but Susanna was just getting sicker. Her mind had already begun to undo itself, and it was made worse by her grief over losing you. Another baby couldn’t fix that. Caleb was just a little bigger than Annie when she died. He was there when Susanna jumped from the falls.”

If what Esther said was true, then Susanna thought she was saving me. And then she killed herself because of it.

I paced to the corner of the barn and back, willing myself not to completely come apart. This was all too much. Too fast. I’d wanted answers, but not like this.

Caleb Rutherford, the vengeful son looking for justice, was also my brother. But all of this still felt like only one string in the web.

“So, Caleb knows that you’re family? That his mother was a Farrow?”

“He’s never acknowledged it, but he knows. He was raised by a man who hates us. That kind of thing can get into the blood, I suppose. Nathaniel kept him far away from the flower farm, but people still talked about it, telling the story about when the minister fell in love with the strange girl from Norfolk.”

“What else haven’t you told me?”

She pressed her fingertips to her forehead, rubbing the placebetween her eyebrows. “A lot. It’s not just Susanna’s life that you don’t know about, there’s the one you lived here, too. It’s not something that can be covered in one conversation.”