Page 81 of The Unmaking of June Farrow

“Why didn’t you say any of this when you brought me in?”

He didn’t answer, but I was already putting it together.

“You don’t want any of that on record, do you?” I said. “Not on the tape, and not in the statements.”

Caleb appeared to be amused by the suggestion. I was right.

He moved again so quickly that I didn’t see his hand coming until he’d already snatched up my arm. He squeezed it, making me gasp. But the music was filling the space around us. Laughter. A glass breaking.

“Iseeyou, June Stone,” he murmured, his face close to mine. “You’re coverin’ for Eamon, and I’ll get what I need to prove it. Then you’re both gonna pay for what you did.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I spoke through clenched teeth, fear coursing through me so swiftly that I could feel a scream trapped in my throat.

I could see the remnants of his father,ourfather, in that crazed look. It was the fractured man who stared back at me from that portrait in the diner. In the same breath, Caleb’s face blurred, interchanging with Nathaniel’s, those same black eyes boring into mine. It wasn’t the first time I’d tasted this fear.

The pain in my arm grew to a sharp ache before he suddenly let me go, and the easy smile returned to his face.

“Now, you enjoy your night.”

Caleb stepped past me and was swallowed up by the crowd. I glanced around me, looking for anyone who may have been watching, but there was no one. I smoothed out the rumpled shoulder of my dress before I set a hand on my stomach, holding it there as a wave of nausea rolled over me.

I could still feel that cold air that surrounded him. I could feel the throb where his fingers had clenched down on my arm. There was no mistaking that look in Caleb’s eyes. He wanted to hurt me.

The pop and fizz of the camera’s flash sounded again and the darkness washed out, blinding me. When my eyes focused, they settled on an old woman behind the back end of the tent. She wore a burgundydress, her white hair pinned up on top of her head. She was watching me with ice-blue eyes, her wrinkled mouth twisting.

Mimi Granger. The woman who’d seen me running through her field that night.

The terror on her face was the same expression I’d seen that day I’d stood on the road in front of her house. She shuffled backward, a hand drifting out behind her as if she was afraid she might fall.

Her gaze didn’t break from mine as she shrank back into the party, and then her dress was no more than a stroke of blood red flitting through the crowd.

I’m dreaming of Eamon.

In the drifts of shallow sleep, I can feel his hands dragging up my body. The weight of him between my legs. I can hear him breathing until there’s the break of a moan in his throat. I can taste salt on my tongue and see bare, moonlit skin.

I’m not asleep anymore. This is the in-between place, like being stuck between two stitches in a seam.

A rush of heat pours into me, spreading like wildfire as my hands find his face. His mouth is on my throat, my shoulder, leaving a tingling trail in its wake, and all I can think is that I don’t want him to stop.

He doesn’t.

The heat inside of me is liquid. It’s simmering now, on the edge of spilling over as I move against him. I can hear myself make a sound, and his hands tighten on me, but when I finally open my eyes, he isn’t there.

The dream faded and I closed my eyes tighter, trying to hold on to it. But the more my mind woke, the further it drew away fromme. My hands twisted in the sheets as it bled into a sea of black, my heavy breaths the only sound in the sunlit room around me.

I could still feel him. Taste him. The smell of his body was swirling in the air, but when I turned my face to see the other side of the bed, it was empty.

It was a dream, yes. But I’d been dreaming of a memory.

I waited for my heartbeat to find its rhythm and for the burning on my skin to cool. It was like he’d really just been there. Like we’d just…I pressed my hands to my face, trying to think about anything else. Anything besides the slide of his skin against mine. Slowly, the live-wire feeling began to dim, and my breaths slowed, one by one.

The memories that had found me before were one thing, but this, I didn’t know if I could take this. They were coming out of nowhere now, sometimes hitting me before I even saw them coming. And at the same time, there were more things that were getting harder to recall.

I reached beneath the pillow to the edge of the mattress. I’d fallen asleep trying to redraw the image in my mind—the memory of the cherry tree. But after less than one day, I’d been unable to reconstruct it.

I unfolded the paper I’d written on, my eyes moving over the words in fits and starts. I understood them. They made sense, the scene written out like the page of a book. A girl picking cherries from a tree until the neighbor comes outside with a ladder. Only now I didn’t remember any of it. It was like hearing a story told about a stranger.

I refolded the paper, pressing it to my chest as my heart sank. My theory had been right. I wasn’t just gaining memories. I was losing them, too.