She pressed her fingertips to her forehead, rubbing the place between her eyebrows. “A lot. It’s not just Susanna’s life that you don’t know about, there’s the one you lived here, too. It’s not something that can be covered in one conversation.”
“Why don’t you start with whatever you least want to tell me, then?”
Esther looked to Eamon again, hesitating. “When you showed up here the first time, I think Nathaniel knew who you were.”
“Knew what?” I stiffened.
“That you were June. His daughter.”
Eamon was staring into the fields, silent.
“How could he possibly know that?”
Esther’s eyes dropped to the birthmark on my neck, and I reached up, instinctively touching it.
“You’ve had that since the day you were born. But it’s not just that. You look like her. You look so much like her.”
That was maybe the only thing Gran ever said about my mother. Sometimes I’d catch her staring at me, that lost look in her eyes growing distant.
“I’m sure that, at first, Nathaniel tried to talk himself out of it, but eventually, he became . . . obsessed with you,” Esther continued. “He convinced himself that you were sent to haunt him, that God was still punishing him for his sins. A few months after you came here, I started seeing him drive past the farm, sometimes multiple times a day. I’d see his car parked down the road and he’d just sit there, smoking his cigarette and waiting. There were a few times when you thought he was following you in town.”
That’s what Eamon had meant when he told Caleb that he’d told his father to stay away from me.
“And that’s why Caleb thinks we might have had something to do with Nathaniel’s murder?” I asked.
“Yes.” Eamon finally spoke. “Nathaniel and I had words more than once about it. A couple of times, there were witnesses to those conversations, so when he turned up dead, there was more than one person in town who reported it, and Caleb started asking questions about where I was that night. He thinks you’re covering for me.”
“If he thinks that, why hasn’t he arrested you?”
“He doesn’t have any real proof, because there is none. But if enough people start taking those claims seriously, we’ll have bigger problems. Nathaniel was loved by this town, and I’ve seen people take matters into their own hands for less.”
That’s what they were really worried about, I remembered. The town turning on them. Maybe that was what eventually happened to Eamon. The reason his farm sat abandoned, no trace of his name in Jasper sixty years from now. He could have been run out of town. Or worse.
“I should get back.” Esther’s hand found my arm, squeezing. “Margaret’s probably sick with worry.”
I didn’t argue. In a matter of days, my entire world had come undone. I was slowly being taken apart, piece by piece. Truth by truth. For the first time, the life I’d lived for thirty-four years felt far away, and when I went back to it, I would be a different person than the one who’d left it.
Esther walked back to her truck without another word, and the headlights disappeared over the hill, taking the sound of the engine with them. Then it was only me and Eamon and the wind in the tobacco that surrounded us.
Annie was sitting at the table with a piece of chalk and some torn pieces of paper when we came inside. I went to the sink, filling a glass with water and gulping it down. Eamon sat on the sofa, kicking his boots from his feet. He looked so tired that the shadows on his face changed the look of him completely.
I hadn’t pried much into the relationship between us, because I was scared to. I was afraid to know what exactly I’d built here and even more afraid to remember it. I could feel this place seeping into me, and these people, too. When I went back, I needed to be able to cut myself from all of it.
I opened the door of the bedroom, but my hand caught its edge, and I looked back at him.
“Eamon?”
He looked up at me, and I caught a glimpse of the Eamon who’d said his life ended when I left.
“Thank you for coming to get me,” I said.
He was still for several seconds before he nodded, and his eyes lingered on me a beat too long. I knew he’d likely come out of concern for himself as much as for me, but when I’d seen him there in the police station, I’d stopped breathing. I could viscerally remember what it had felt like to be tucked into him, his arm around me and his voice close as we went down those steps.
I closed myself in the bedroom and leaned into the door, biting down on my thumbnail as my gaze drifted to the wardrobe. Caleb wasn’t just a son trying to solve his father’s murder. He had a history with Eamon and me. And what he’d said about Mimi Granger had been replaying in my thoughts since I’d left the station.
The woman’s wide eyes as she stumbled into the house and shut the door flashed through my mind. She’d been scared when she saw me, maybe thinking of that night she said I’d run through her field, covered in blood, with Annie in my arms.
I tried to summon the splintered memory that had tried to seize me at the police station. A field. The road. The sound of my own labored breath. But it wouldn’t come.
I crossed the floor of the small room and opened the doors of the wardrobe, inspecting the clothes folded on the three small shelves and pulling them out to feel along the wood. Then I searched between and behind each of the hanging pieces. There was nothing there except for the faint smell of dried lavender and the dust that had gathered in the last year.
No blue shoe like the one Caleb had.
I sank down to the floor, feeling like this was another one of those threads, unraveling so fast that I couldn’t catch hold of it.
I looked at my hands, resting on the neatly folded stack of Eamon’s shirts. Without thinking, I curled my fingers around the one on top and picked it up. Before I could stop myself, I was pressing my face to it, inhaling deeply.
That smell was warmth. It pooled inside of me, filling the narrowest of spaces, and I closed my eyes. It hurt, unleashing a physical ache that reached through my entire body. It was alive, that feeling. A trapped thing trying to get out.
When my eyes opened, they focused on that swath of white lace in the back of the wardrobe.
Slowly, I set the shirt back in its place and got to my feet. I took the hanger from where it hung. The length of the dress fell to the floor, kissing my feet, and I sucked in a breath. It was a simply cut garment with a fine layer of lace over the top that fluttered at the shoulders and clasped at the back of the neck.
The fabric was perfect and unstained, a creamy color that tinged gold in the dim light. Beautiful. And just looking at it made me lose my grip on that pain threatening to erupt inside of me. I couldn’t contain it anymore.
I’m standing beneath a willow tree, cool grass beneath my feet. Before me, a tortoiseshell button on Eamon’s shirt comes sharply into focus. I’m staring into his chest, but then my eyes find his.