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Back When the Reckoning Comes Save as PDF
Chapters (44)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. Epigraph
  4. They are coming.
  5. I.
  6. II.
  7. III.
  8. Once, they stole away.
  9. IV.
  10. V.
  11. VI.
  12. VII.
  13. VIII.
  14. IX.
  15. X.
  16. XI.
  17. XII.
  18. Those who stayed behind found their own ways to resist.
  19. XIII.
  20. XIV.
  21. They remembered the feeling of their beloveds sold,
  22. XV.
  23. XVI.
  24. XVII.
  25. XVIII.
  26. XIX.
  27. XX.
  28. It took the babies drowning for the rest to say, Enough.
  29. XXI.
  30. XXII.
  31. XXIII.
  32. Tools meant for work became seen as weapons.
  33. XXIV.
  34. XXV.
  35. XXVI.
  36. XXVII.
  37. XXVIII.
  38. When they were caught, punishment was swift and severe in its execution.
  39. XXIX.
  40. Soon it would be morning, and those left behind would prepare for another day.
  41. Acknowledgments
  42. About the Author
  43. Also by LaTanya McQueen
  44. About the Publisher

With a plan in place, she left the room and went outside to figure out where she should try to look for Celine. The truth was she had no idea where Celine could have gone. She couldn’t say she knew Celine anymore, however close they used to be when they were younger. She wondered if the two women at the bar were right, if Celine had really bailed on her wedding. Mira thought back to the expression on Celine’s face last night. Her flippant joke. Had Celine been trying to say something else, something darker? Despite the distance between them, if Celine truly had been unhappy, Mira hoped Celine would have said something. If Celine couldn’t, then what did it say about who they’d been to each other after all? Celine had to be fine, Mira reasoned, and so she walked out into the sun in the hope of finding her.

XII.

KRISTINA HADN’T MENTIONED searching the fields, so Mira decided she’d look there first, partly because she felt a beckoning to return. She trudged along the path away from the Big House, pausing every few minutes to get her bearings. In the light of the day, the layout of the grounds confused her, and she had a difficult time gauging which direction she needed to go.

“Excuse me. I’m looking for the tobacco fields?” Mira asked a man she came across on the path.

“What do you want to go out there for? There’s no showing today because of the wedding, although that doesn’t look like it’s happening either.”

“Please, I don’t have my map and I don’t have time to go back to my room and try to find it. Do you know which way?”

“The fields are that way, I think,” he said, pointing south, and Mira started in that direction.

While she tried to think about Celine and where she might be, she couldn’t escape the image of the woman in white. Mira had been too far away to recognize her face, but whoever she was, she’d been alone, and no one came out to these woods unless they were looking for something or someone was looking for them. What other reason could a person have, especially with the night’s darkness surrounding them? The woman’s attention had been fixed on what lay hidden deep among the tobacco stalks, something Mira had been unable to see, and she wanted to find what last night she might have missed.