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Her forehead wrinkled. “How?”

“I don’t know. But you said that for us, time was a fraying rope, right? Multiple strands. If I’m gaining memories from one life andlosing them from the other, maybe that means that time is mending for me. Maybe it means that I won’t be able to cross a third time.”

It was a theory, one that was based on nothing but my own fear. I was grasping at straws.

Esther wrapped her arms around me, holding me close to her. “We all have to make a choice,” she said softly, “and it’s different for each of us. Yours will be different from mine. From Margaret’s. And Susanna’s.”

I let myself lean into her, closing my eyes. The problem was that I’d already made my choice when I left this place. I wasn’t sure I’d get to make another.

“You don’t think she killed herself, do you?” I whispered, asking the question as bluntly as I could. I wasn’t going to dance around things anymore, afraid to disrupt their lives. This had been my life, too. “You think Nathaniel killed Susanna.”

There was no denial in her eyes or in her silence, a slow admission settling on her face. “I told you. There was something about your mother that just wasn’t…right. She had no center to her, no inner compass. She was one of those people who was blown by the wind, at the mercy of her feelings and her fears,” she paused. “She wasn’t like you, June. I loved her, but she was weak.”

There was a deep echo of guilt behind the words. On some level, Esther felt responsible.

“I thought she’d done the right thing, sending you through the door, but there was no going back after that. Truly. It was more than the splitting of time and what it did to her mind. She was ruined in other places we couldn’t see.”

“That sounds to me like someone who might take their own life,” I said.

She smiled sadly. “No. She wasn’t strong enough, even for that, I’m afraid.”

It was such a cruel thing to say, but the love she had for Susanna was evident in her voice. It had been since the first time I’d heard Esther talk about her that way.

“They never found her.” She continued. “She wouldn’t be the first to die at the falls, and it might take days or weeks, but eventually, there’s a body. That part was odd, though not impossible. And when the man who saw her jump was the town minister, no one questioned it.”

If she was right, then the most beloved man in Jasper, the man whose own son called him a cruel bastard, was a murderer. And the only one who seemed to know it was Esther. Probably Eamon, too. What lengths would he have gone to to be sure Annie and I were safe from a man like that?

Esther wasn’t avoiding my gaze anymore, letting me see for the first time what lay within her. Esther Farrow wasn’t just a farmer or a grandmother or a town outcast. This woman was a flame.Shewas dangerous, too.

The thing she and Eamon had in common was that ferocious protectiveness. If he murdered Nathaniel, maybe she’d helped. It was even possible that they’d planned it together.

“Do you think Eamon did it?” I asked, not mincing words. “Do you think that Eamon killed Nathaniel?”

She knew the answer to that question. I could see it in the wide openness of her eyes.

“I don’t know what happened that night, and I’ve never asked. But that man would have done a lot worse for you,” she said.

That wasn’t a complete answer, but it confirmed what I suspected—that she believed Eamonwascapable of killing.

I drove myself back to the house, leaving the keys to Esther’s truck on the driver’s seat, the way Margaret had done. Eamon was waiting at the kitchen table, but I walked straight past him, to the bedroom, unbuttoning my dress and letting it fall from my shoulders. The mountain air was cool at night, even when the days were warm. I pulled on the nightdress before I braided my hair over my shoulder and turned on the lamp.

The article I’d torn from the newspaper at Esther’s was still in my pocket, and I drew it out, adding it to the others hidden behind thebed. I could hear Annie’s small footsteps trailing after Eamon’s in the house. There was the jostle of dishes in the kitchen. The sound of the kettle. They ate dinner, and he didn’t knock on my door.

I watched their shadows move where the crack of light was shifting on the floor, until the house went dark and silent. I imagined that this was what this home had been like for the last year without me in it. A shell. A tomb.

It was like the embers of a sleeping fire somewhere inside of me, the capacity I had to hold this version of a life. I couldn’t quite grasp it, but that feeling I’d had looking at Eamon as we stood in the glowing lights of the Midsummer Faire had fully manifested now. I didn’t know what was me and what wasn’t anymore. Was I becoming someone else, or was I just finally becoming myself? I couldn’t tell.

Long after the moon rose, when I still hadn’t closed my eyes, I got up and went to the mirror that hung over the dressing table. I drew in a slow breath, my hand finding the thin fabric of my nightgown, and I pressed my palm flat against my stomach. The heel of my hand followed my hip bone.

This body had carried a child. The very thought was an explosion behind my ribs. My heart felt like it was going to break through my chest every time I dared to envision it.

I could see it in my fractured mind, the image of me in that mirror, barefoot and belly swollen. I couldfeelit.

I bit down on my lip, the vision painting itself in such specifics that I began to think I’d created it from nothing. But this wasn’t the blurred conjuring of imagination. This was like that moment my hand moved up the planes of Eamon’s back, as if it already knew its path.

A soft cry bled through the walls of the bedroom, and I sucked in a breath, my hand curling tight from where it was pressed to my abdomen. Annie was crying that delirious, sleepy sound that surfaced every night like clockwork.

I stilled, waiting for Eamon’s footsteps to follow, but they didn’tcome, the empty silence of the house widening. When her cries grew louder, I struck a match and lit the candle on the bedside table.