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“It wasn’t like that for me. I didn’t even know about any of this until yesterday.”

“It wouldn’t matter if you were six years old or if you were eighty. We’re like moths to the flame, and once you cross, it begins.”

“What begins?”

“The fraying.”

I waited.

She set her elbows on the table, as if settling, and I found myself wondering if she’d been the one to tell me all of this the last time. “I’ll explain it to you the way it was explained to me. Time is like a rope,made of many fibers, and when they’re bound up together, they make one strong timeline.”

She stared at me, waiting to be convinced of whether I was following.

“But once you cross it, it begins to fray. Those fibers loosen. Unwind. Eventually, they are bound to unravel. Then you don’t have one timeline anymore.”

Two places at once. Twotimesat once.

“So, they’re real? The things I’m seeing and hearing?”

She nodded. “They’re just parallel threads.”

“But.” My mind went to that notebook I’d kept tucked under my mattress. “I only went through the door yesterday. If it starts after you cross, why did the episodes start a year ago?”

Esther squinted. “A year ago?”

“Yeah.”

“Exactly?”

“Almost. The first one was July 2, 2022.”

There was an unmistakable reaction that rippled through Esther’s body, but she recovered well, tucking a stray hair behind her ear and clearing her throat. “Well, this isn’t the first time you’ve crossed, June.”

As soon as she said it, I realized I already had the pieces of that puzzle. My mother disappeared when she was pregnant with me. She most likely gave birth to me on the other side.

“Are you saying that I was born here, in this time?”

“Well, not in this time, obviously. You were born in the year 1912, and the fray is different for all of us. Sometimes it takes months for it to begin, sometimes years. Decades.”

The explanation sounded practiced and carefully constructed, but Esther still looked shaken. Uncomfortable, even.

“For my mother,” she continued, “it began only a few months after she crossed, and it was swift, breaking her mind in a matter of years. For me, it took a long time to come on, and it’s been slow and steady.”

“So, you’re…?”

“Sick? It has nothing to do with being sick. It’s more like having two sets of eyes, one that sees this world and one that sees the other. Eventually, they start bleeding into each other, andthat’swhere the madness lies.”

“But how do you stop it?”

“You can’t. The door appears to the Farrow women, and at one point or another, theywillwalk through it. And once you’ve crossed, your mind never fully crosses back.”

I stared into the steam rising from my coffee cup, that familiar, bleak feeling settling back over me. I’d felt it. The draw to the door had been like a tightening thread. Had I even hesitated before I reached for the knob? I couldn’t remember now.

“I suppose at one time or another, it was a useful gift.” Esther paused. “But like everything else, it comes with a cost.”

“And Susanna?”

“Susanna was—” She stopped herself, as if trying to find the right words. “She met him—Nathaniel—the first time she crossed. Only days after. We told people she was a cousin visiting from Norfolk, Virginia. I thought she’d be here a few weeks and go, but those two…I’d never seen twin flames like that before, two people dragging each other so deep, so fast.”