As I stood there watching Eamon’s arms fold around his daughter, I found myself in one of those vulnerable moments when the truth came for me. I’d stayed unyielding because I’d had to, but the June who’d married Eamon and had borne his child had been weak. She’d been the worst kind of selfish, and I was broken into two pieces—one that was ashamed of her and one that was envious of her.
The crying stopped, followed by a few quiet sniffs, and then the house was silent again. They lay like that until their breaths drew deep and long, and I stood watching them because I couldn’t stop. His arm draped around her little frame. Her head tucked beneath his chin. They fit together like puzzle pieces, and the thought made a pain erupt inside of me that I could hardly bear.
This was the field that I had planted. With my very own hands. And then I’d left it all to rot.
Fifteen
I had to remember. All of it.
I woke before Eamon and Annie, when the sun was just beginning to paint a blue haze on the mountain peaks in the distance. The farm was quiet when I came down the back steps, and the faint call of birds was muted by a soft breeze that swept over the tobacco.
I’d been up half the night thinking about it. If I was somehow triggering memories of my unlived life, then it was only a matter of time before I knew exactly what happened here before I left. There was no way to go back and undo it. What was done was done. But I’d had years here, filled with the things I’d never been brave enough to admit that I wanted. Now I needed to know why Gran had lied, and why I’d chosen to leave.
My boots waded through the tall, wet grass that stretched between the barn and the house as Callie watched me from the paddock. I tried to let my mind and my body follow the faint rhythm that was humming beneath my thoughts. It was at the tip of my fingers, under my tongue. A routine I was on the verge of remembering. One I’d done every morning.
I fetched the water and the eggs, testing myself with the little things I couldn’t possibly know. Which trays in the chicken coop would have eggs and which were always bare. How the pump at the well needed a firm tug to the side before I pushed it down. I’d been so careful not to touch anything, afraid I would disturb the precarious balance between me and this place. But with every surface my fingertips grazed, I was filling in the edges of a picture. It wasn’t just Eamon’s home. It had been mine, too.
I stepped out of my boots, leaving them on the steps as I came into the kitchen. I didn’t let myself think, moving with nothing more than muscle memory. It was stilted, but it was definitely there. I placed the kettle on the burner, and my gaze was instinctively pulled like a magnet to the coffee can on top of the icebox. I knew this choreography. I’d probably done it hundreds of times.
I smiled to myself, excitement brimming in my blood. It was a drip, but it was steady.
I had to search to find the jar of shortening, but other things came more easily. When I reached into the cupboard for the sugar bowl, it was exactly where I’d expected it to be. My hand even seemed to recognize the feel of the lid as I lifted it and the shape of the spoon as I stirred two spoonfuls into my coffee.
As the kettle whirred on the stove, I started the biscuit dough, folding the milk into the peaks of flour with one hand while I turned the mixing bowl with the other. My blistered knuckles burned as I stirred. It was the same recipe that I’d grown up making with Gran and that she’d grown up making with Esther. I’d decided to start here, with things I knew I would have brought with me through the door the first time, and it was working. In fact, it was working better than I’d expected.
The groan of the little bed in Annie’s nook made me look up from the wide-mouthed bowl. Through the doorway, I could see Eamon sitting up stiffly, as if his whole body hurt. He’d slept the rest of the night in that bed, him and Annie tangled together, and I’d had to force my eyes to stop finding them as I moved quietly through the house. They, too, felt like a fixed point. A gravity relentlessly pulling at my edges.
Eamon’s gaze scanned the house, eyes blinking against sleep, and when they found me, his brow furrowed. He stood, making a half-hearted attempt to comb his hair back with his fingers, and his white shirt hiked up on one side to reveal his hip. I immediately dropped my eyes, heat flaring along my collarbone. Eamon was the kind of handsome that was carved from forests and rivers. He had the look of someone who’d spent his life in the sun, hands in the dirt. Every color, curve, and angle of him was shaped with it. That stomach-dropping feeling inside of me when I looked at him was a reflex, I told myself. Just a different kind of recall.
When he made it into the kitchen, he leaned into the wall with one shoulder, watching me. His jaw flexed as he swallowed, the seconds reconstructing themselves into a white-knuckled silence.
I stopped stirring. “What?”
He shook his head as if trying to break loose whatever train of thought was there. “Nothing.” His voice was a deep rasp. “It’s just—” He didn’t finish.
I set my hands on the table, waiting and noticing that for once, he wasn’t angry. He looked almost upset, like he was swallowing down that same pain in his chest that I could feel expanding behind my ribs.
“It’s just that sometimes”—he paused—“it’s hard to look at you.” His accent was thicker. With sleep or emotion, I couldn’t tell. But it made that spreading pain find my hollow places.
I bit the inside of my cheek, unsure of what to say, but Eamon didn’t give me the chance to respond. He turned back into the sitting room, taking something from the side table next to the sofa. When he came back, he held it out to me.
It was a pair of gloves. Small leather gloves.
My eyes traveled up to meet his, but they were off of me now. “Are these . . . ?”
“Yours,” he answered.
I looked down at my hands. They were torn up from working in the garden yesterday, my calluses useless without gloves. My skin was striped with cuts, my nails rimmed in red.
I took the offering, pressing the soft, worn leather between my fingers, and a small lump came up into my throat. “Thank you,” I said, softly.
He nodded once, filling the kitchen with that silence again before he gestured to the percolator on the stove. “May I?”
I looked at him in confusion before I realized he was asking permission to pour himself a cup of coffee. “Oh, yeah,” I stammered awkwardly, tucking the gloves into the back pocket of my jeans.
He turned to the side, moving past me in the small kitchen, and when he reached over me for the cup, the space between us grew narrower. A feeling like static surfaced on my skin, an electric hum that made me draw away from him just slightly. I couldn’t help it.
When he noticed, he stepped backward, giving his back to me.
I picked up the spoon, stirring, and I watched him from the corner of my eye as he took a sip of coffee. “I knew her name,” I said.
His cup stopped midair, eyes locking with mine. “What?”
I let out a long breath, trying to decide how much I wanted to tell him.
“The horse. Yesterday, I remembered her name before you told me what it was.”
Eamon was still rigid, his eyes fully awake now. “How?”