Page 93 of The Unmaking of June Farrow

I’d already collected what couldn’t be saved—a broken perfume bottle, torn papers, the bedside table that had toppled over and cracked a leg. The last of the mess was the clothes that had been taken from the wardrobe and the quilts stripped from the bed.

This was what Eamon had meant about things getting out of hand. Caleb was hell-bent, so fixated on us that he’d been willing to break the law to get what he needed. He was a man on the verge of becoming unhinged, making me think that Esther had been right abouthim. He may have hated his father, but he still had Nathaniel’s blood running through his veins.

I hung up the dress, my eyes following Annie through the bedroom window. She was walking the edge of the field, tapping the wide, flat leaves of tobacco with her hands as she made her way to the house.

Eamon came inside, and I met him in the kitchen, leaning into the wall beside the back door. We’d been like that all day, quiet and not wanting to say out loud what we were thinking. Things were catching up to us, and Eamon and I were one thing. Annie was another.

“The articles and the photograph don’t prove anything other than the fact that we were interested.” He said, “There have to be dozens of people in Jasper who kept those same clippings. But the years that were written down, you don’t know what they mean?”

“I’m pretty sure they correspond with crossings.”

He tore a sheet from the notepad on the counter and set it onto the table before he found a pencil and handed it to me. “Do you remember them?” he asked.

I nodded, taking a seat before I wrote the years out in the same order they’d been on the paper that Caleb took.

1912

1946

1950

1951

Before what happened last night, I hadn’t told him about the things I’d found in the bedroom, because I wasn’t sure what they meant or if I’d had a reason for hiding them from him in the first place. But we were beyond that now. Eamon and I were going to have to find a way to be honest with each other if we were going to keep things from burning down.

He came to stand beside me, close enough to conjure to life thelantern-lit moment in the barn when he’d kissed me. I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it.

He set both hands on the table, studying the numbers.

I kept writing, annotating the years.

1912—Esther brings June to 1989 (age 7 months)

1946—June (age 35) arrives

1950—June (age 39) leaves

Eamon was quiet as I tried to work it out.

I set the tip of the pencil back down on the paper, filling it in.

1951—June (age 34) returns

“This is the one that doesn’t make sense. Why would I write down a year in the future?”

“Maybe you were planning to come back.”

I shook my head. “1950 was my third time to cross, which means I knew I couldn’t go back through the door.”

“Well, in a way, youdidcome back.”

That’s what worried me—the five-year overlap, orloophole,as Esther had called it.

I closed my eyes, running over every piece of the puzzle I had. There was something about all of this that feltplanned,like Eamon said.

“You said before that I promised you I wouldn’t go back through the door? Is that because you thought I was going to?”

“I don’t know what I thought.”