We move up against each other, and lips brush lips. He unzips the back of my dress, and as soon as it hits the floor, I kick it away. He slides the underwear free of my hips, and I reach around and release myself from the black bra, pulling him toward the bed as he divests himself of his own clothing, I don’t think of my mother or the things she did. I think of nothing but Ezra.

No words and no light make everything slow right down, infuse every detail with intention and meaning. The creak of the bed as we lower ourselves onto it, the exhale of breath, the soft whisper of skin against skin, the wind through the trees just outside the window. Our years of friendship and separation suddenly culminate into something so much more.

MAY

When I materialize, it’s in the upstairs hallway. I’m alone, but I know June is on the other side of her bedroom door. It’s the first time I’ve arrived apart from her. The cottage is quiet, but there’s a sense that it’s the stillness after an event. The air still pulses with the electricity of action. Not details I would have noticed when I was alive, but dead you feel it all.

I remember a time just like this one, standing on the other side of June’s door in the middle of the night. I turned the key and locked her inside her room. The details around it are hazy. There was a fight between my parents, and I know I had left June so I could go hide at the bottom of the stairs and listen in.

I can’t remember what the fight was about or how long I stayed down there. All that’s surfacing is the moment I locked June in her room. Why would I have done that? The question causes another shift in the deep, dark place where the memory lies. As though it’s preparing to rise up, as though it’s only a matter of time before I will remember.

I realize, in this moment, that it was me who buried the memory deep down. Deeper than any of my other memories, which is why it’s taking so long to surface. That’s because it’s not just a memory—it’s a secret. A secret so dark that I had to bury it deep down, deep enough that even June wouldn’t know about it.

JUNE