Page 83 of The Unmaking of June Farrow

“I only want to ask you a question.” I put my hands up in front of me, trying to calm her. “And then I’ll go. I swear.”

She still looked like a wild animal with those yellowed, owlish eyes, but her thin lips pursed, like she was waiting.

I lowered my hands, glancing over my shoulder to the field on the west side of her property. “I just want you to tell me what you saw that night.”

“What?” she croaked.

“The night you told Sheriff Rutherford about. When you saw me running through that field.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What is this?”

“I just need to know exactly what you saw.”

“I told him what you did. I told himexactlywhat you did.”

“I don’t remember!” The words crashed into one another, making Mimi flinch.

I knew it was the wrong thing to say, a dangerous thing to admit. She could go straight back to Caleb and tell him everything. But there was something about the way she was looking at me that made the words spill from my mouth. Like if she could somehow see how lost I was, she would help me. She would tell me the truth.

Mimi’s hand fell from the doorknob as she stared up at me. She was quiet for a long moment before she came outside. The shawl around her shoulders was pulled tight now, her crooked brow relaxing.

“Please,” I said again, my voice tired.

She let the screen door close, turning toward the west field. Her hand lifted, and she pointed one knobby finger at the rocking chair that sat at the corner of the porch. “I sit out here at night just after the sun goes down, when it cools off and the mosquitoes clear out. I was sittin’ in that chair there when I saw you.”

“What was I doing?”

She shrugged. “Runnin’.” The way she said it unleashed a dread within me. This woman wasn’t lying.

“Where, exactly?”

That same finger traced a path from the tree line in the distance to the fence that lined the road. “You were comin’ from the river.”

The river. That’s where Nathaniel had been murdered, but his body was found far downstream from here, closer to the falls.

“You were wearin’ a white dress and it had red splotches all over it, on your chest and legs. It was on your arms, too. In your hair.”

My stomach lurched.

“You had that little girl. You were carryin’ her in your arms, and when you made it to the road, you just disappeared. So, I called down to the sheriff’s office and told them they needed to send someone over to check on things.”

“I didn’t say anything?”

She shook her head. “I called out to you, but it was like you didn’t hear me. You had this look on your face…like…I don’t know how to describe it. You looked like you weren’t really there. Almost like you were sleepwalkin’ or somethin’.”

My eyes fixed on that field, trying again to imagine myself there.

“You really don’t remember any of this?”

“No,” I whispered. “I don’t.”

We stood there in a long silence as I watched the field. Only weeks ago, they’d found that shoe in the tedder—the one I’d sworn I’d never seen. Mimi had no reason to lie about what she saw that night. No reason to call the sheriff before Nathaniel’s body was even found. And then there was the fact that the timing lined up. If I’d walked back from Esther’s, I would have passed just beyond that tree line. If I had to, I could have cut through the field.

Mimi didn’t say another word as I walked back to the truck. I pulled onto the road as she stood on the porch and watched me. She had one hand up to block the sun from her eyes, the other propped on her hip.

I believed that she saw me the night of the Midsummer Faire, but it was a memory I didn’t have yet. That’s what this felt like, inheriting moments until they made an entire reality. Bit by bit, I was getting pieces. If that was true, then eventually, I would feel as if I’d lived this life. I’d recapture it, in a way.

It had never been clearer to me than it was now that this wasn’t just about the June who came through the door five years ago. It was about Susanna and the baby she’d asked Esther to take through that door. It was about the minister’s body found in the river. I still didn’t know if Eamon was actually capable of killing someone, but these were single stars in a constellation I couldn’t fully see.