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The door sits in the middle of the field, hidden from the rest of the world.

I am a stone sinking into a deep, dark sea. And I’m not coming back.

I reach the door with a final, silent footstep, and the wind picks up, pulling my nightgown around me. It’s the same door that has appeared for the last five years, and the last time I opened it, I’d been someone else. I had no idea what waited on the other side.

The weight of the locket is suddenly heavy around my neck, and I reachinside my nightgown, pulling it free. It clicks as it opens, and I turn its face toward the moonlight. The hands are set to 2022. A place where I exist, where a thirty-three-year-old June Farrow is caring for her ailing grandmother and trying to keep the farm running. Afraid of the future. Grieved by the past. And I’m putting every bit of hope I have in her.

I lift my unsteady hand, and the moment my fingertips touch the doorknob, I don’t give myself time to change my mind. I turn it. Pull it open. What lies on the other side is a blackness I have never seen. It’s a darkness that eats itself. A thick wall of nothing.

I’m shaking as my foot crosses the threshold. My breath is a storm inside my head, and when I pull the door closed behind me, the crack of moonlight becomes a sliver. A knife in the dark.

It disappears with a click.

I’m

I

Susanna Rutherford’s body was exhumed from its thirty-four-year resting place on July 3, 1951.

They found her beneath the oak tree, right where Nathaniel said she would be.

I stood on the north side of the river as the men worked, shovels in hand and white T-shirts marked with dirt as they dug. On the other side, Caleb was watching, and I could tell the exact moment they found her. A silence fell over the woods, even the birds going quiet.

She was bones and dust, had been for years, and in some way, that felt not too unlike the myth I’d always known her as. She was a prism that colored me and my world with a story. We were the limbs of a broken tree with poisoned roots.

We laid Susanna to rest three days later, and those same men who’d been at the river dug another hole in the ground. The headstone that Nathaniel had erected all those years ago still stood in the churchyard, making her the first Farrow to be buried within the fence of that cemetery. But no one ever dug up the small grave beside it for her daughter, June Rutherford.

A year later, I sat on the stool in front of the dressing table in mybedroom as Margaret wove tiny chamomile blooms through the braids in my hair. She was humming a song to herself, a glimpse of that little girl I had once known visible in the reflection as I watched her.

I could remember her now. Eleven years old. Twelve. Thirteen. Now she was seventeen, on the cusp of womanhood. She’d asked me once what it was like between us before I came here, and even though I’m not supposed to talk about the future, I told her that she was a mother to me. My dearest friend. And looking at her now, it was still true.

I still had the memory of that night on the hill with the sun going down and the fiddle playing when Birdie—Annie—reached for my hand and we said goodbye to Gran. But before I was born, she’d be the one to say goodbye tome.Soon, that memory would be gone, and I’d have to relive it before I could remember it again.

The curse on the Farrows had broken the natural laws of the world, and with it had come so much suffering. But in this, there’d been the most unexpected of gifts. Looking back, I understood that sadness I’d seen in Birdie’s eyes when I left the house that day. It was the same reason she’d hesitated before she’d handed me that envelope.

It was a goodbye.

That moment was dimming, like the rest of them. It had been a year since I left, and the memories ofthislife were still coming, but the patches were few and far between. I had a new notebook now—one where I’d written every memory I could think of that I would miss. I recorded them in as much detail as I could recall, making a kind of archive of the life I’d lived. Cooking with Gran in the kitchen. Making garlands in the shop with Birdie. Countless summer afternoons with Mason at the river.

On the other side of the door, I will become a story, not unlike my father and my mother. Children will tell stories of seeing me in the woods. There will be rumors that I’d thrown myself from the falls, but life will go on. Three years after I cross, Birdie’s full, beautiful life—her timeline—will end. And with it, so will the Farrows’. Mason willinherit the Adeline River Flower Farm, and he’ll eventually fall in love with a woman who comes to work as an intern one summer.

On this side of the door, I will live a life I thought I never deserved. Not even one year after we bury Susanna, Caleb will leave Jasper. For reasons I’ll never know, he will keep my secret.

It takes almost two years for the door to show up again, then five and a half. Eleven years after that, once the very last of my memories have faded, it will appear a final time.

Eamon and I will plant fields and tend them. We will raise our daughter, and even after we are too old to farm, we will spend the rest of our lives in this little yellow house on Hayward Gap Road. Annie will grow. She will age. She will never see the red door.

Margaret tidied the braid pinned across the crown of my head, and I caught her hand with mine when it landed on my shoulder.

On September 19, 1966, she will bear a child and name her Susanna. My own timeline will overlap with my mother’s for just over twenty years before I die. I will watch her be born, then she will watchmebe born, and this cycle, this revolution, will begin again.

I would spend the rest of my life walking the precarious line of what I would and would not tell Margaret and Annie. What to leave to fate and what to prepare them for. They’d done the same for me, and it hadn’t been perfect, but it had been a life full of love.

It was almost overwhelmingly painful to be so happy.

“Thank you,” I said, emotion thick in my throat. “For everything.”

Margaret gave me her sweet smile. “You’re welcome.”