🕰 Free chapter of Until Time Remembers
Flashback Chapter: Sorrow And Knowledge
Before Beck uncovered the truth about Burrington… before she knew the weight of forgotten memories and fractured time… there were whispers.
There were moments like this; quiet, eerie, and unforgettable.
I’m sharing this flashback chapter from Until Time Remembers because it captures the atmosphere, emotion, and haunting history at the heart of the story, without giving away the full mystery.
If you feel a chill after reading, you can dive into the full book right here:
Book one is also available on Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Fable, Kobo and select libraries.
They call me the one who remembers.
Not because I asked for the burden, but because the burden wouldn’t let go.
I ain’t sure what year it is no more, not really. Could be 1826. Could be 1843. Could be now. All I know is I wake up to the same air, walk the same roads, hear the same names whispered like prayers and curses stitched together.
My name is Natalie Seinfeld. And I have watched my siblings die more times than God would allow if He was still watchin’.
Some of this I lived.
Some I only know.
And some-well, some crawled into my chest and made a home there whether I wanted it or not.
I didn’t used to talk like this. I was more proper once. Spoke neat. Kept my shoulders back like Mama taught me. But after a few decades of loopin’ sorrow, you stop carin’ how your voice lands. All that matters is it’s still echoing.
So if you’re listenin’… really listenin’…
I’ll tell you about the rot.
How it started small. Quiet. The way most curses do.
Burrington was never clean. Not truly. But when we came, it looked like a place where children might grow without fear. Where wildflowers could bloom beside the bakery, and lanterns would light the road like little stars.
Papa believed in the town. Said it was a second chance for us all.
Mama never trusted the soil.
She said the land had memory. That it remembered what was taken. That it mourned something lost so deep it couldn’t speak, only curse.
Back then, I didn’t understand her. But Millie did.
Millie always understood the things no one said out loud.
We lived in a small house near the western edge of town, just where the hill dips and the pines start to gather like they’re whisperin’ secrets. Our windows fogged in the morning, and the floorboards creaked no matter how gentle your step.
But it was home.
Johnny and Millie were my younger siblings. Twins. The kind that finish each other’s sentences and steal each other’s thoughts.
Millie had a quiet fire in her.
And Johnny-Johnny had armor. Not the kind you wear. The kind you become, for the sake of someone you love.
When the land started changin’, it showed itself in small ways first.
Birds wouldn’t nest near our garden anymore. The cows cried at night. The well grew bitter for three days, then went back to sweet like nothin’ happened. But Mama watched the wind like it carried messages. She’d say, “Something gone wrong here,” and then pray with her face pressed to the dirt.
It was about that time that Millie began sneakin’ off in the evenings.
She said she was walking alone. Said she liked the quiet.
But one night, I followed her.
And that’s when I saw them.
Millie and Emma Lorne, tucked beneath the sycamore behind the apothecary. Holding hands. Whisperin’ things only girls in love whisper.
They were soft with each other. Gentle in a way the world never was with us. I watched from behind the fence and didn’t breathe, didn’t blink. Not because I was ashamed-no, never ashamed.
But because I knew what Burrington would do if it ever found out.
And it did.
Emma’s father was a loud man, all tobacco breath and talk of tradition. When he found Millie’s letter in Emma’s dress pocket, the world cracked open.
He didn’t come alone. He brought others; neighbors, men from the chapel, even some of the shopkeepers who’d once given Millie candy just for smilin’.
They said it was unnatural.
Said Millie was a blight.
Said Johnny was in on it for keepin’ her secret.
They didn’t ask questions.
They broke in through the back door of our home on a night with no moon.
I didn’t see it. But I felt it.
The house went silent so fast, I woke choking on the quiet.
By the time Mama and Papa ran in, it was too late.
Johnny had been thrown against the iron stove. Blood behind his head. He’d wrapped himself around Millie, and took the brunt of every kick meant for her.
Millie’s face was already losing shape when we found her. Eyes wide open. Fingers still clutched around the necklace Emma gave her.
She didn’t die right away.
I remember holding her hand.
I remember her trying to speak.
But all she managed to say was, “Don’t let them forget us.”
And we didn’t.
Or rather, we couldn’t.
Because the town made sure we couldn’t.
The day of their funeral was heavy with wind, like the sky was trying to scream but couldn’t open its mouth. Folks came wearing black, but I saw no mourning in their eyes. Only relief.
As if burying the twins had cleaned the town of sin.
But it hadn’t.
It had invited something in.
Something old. Something hungry. Something buried beneath the roots of Burrington long before we claimed the land as ours.
There are stories, whispers passed from fire to fire, about a child taken during the founding. A child who vanished in the smoke and screams when the town was wrestled from those who lived here first.
Some say the child was buried.
Others say she never stopped walking.
Me? I saw her once.
Or someone like her.
A little girl with ash-colored eyes and hair like dusk. She stood near the river the day after the twins were buried. Just standing. Staring. And then she was gone.
Mama saw her too.
She said, “They took from the land, and the land took back.”
And now?
Now we wake up to the same funeral.
Over and over.
Millie still stands in her torn dress.
Johnny still bleeds by the altar.
I still read the same poem, written from memory because the paper rotted years ago.
And they all still stare at her-
Lavinia.
Even when she ain’t there, they look for her.
Because somehow… they think she started it. Or maybe she was supposed to stop it.
I don’t know anymore.
All I know is I feel her in the grief.
Like the earth hasn’t forgotten her name.
I think on that last supper often. The way the firelight danced in Papa’s eyes. The soft clink of forks against mismatched plates. Mama’s humming while she stirred the beans.
We didn’t know, of course.
We didn’t know that would be the last time we laughed in that house. The last time the roof heard joy and not screams. The last time Millie looked free.
She’d braided her hair that night. Slipped wildflowers into the strands like she always did when she’d been walkin’ with Emma.
She came to the table late, smiling like her cheeks couldn’t hold it all.
“Don’t even bother lyin’, child,” Papa said, squintin’ at her. “You’ve been with that Lorne girl again.”
Millie froze, a spoon halfway to her lips. “I…”
But Mama just chuckled, wiping her hands on her apron. “We knew the moment your shoes came in muddy and your heart walked in light.”
“I didn’t mean to lie,” Millie whispered.
“You never did,” I said, nudging her foot under the table.
Johnny laughed. “We was just waitin’ for you to say it out loud.”
She blinked at us, eyes wide and glassy. “You… you’re not angry?”
“No,” Papa said softly. “I’m angry at a world that don’t let girls like you love without fear.”
And Mama added, “You’ll tell it all when you’re ready. And not a moment sooner.”
That night the house held hope.
We sat long after the food was gone, talkin’ about Emma’s love for poetry, how she read to Millie in the field behind the butcher’s, how they carved their initials into the tree behind the old mill.
Johnny made jokes about chaperonin’ them like an overprotective aunt.
Millie laughed until tears came.
Even I, haunted Natalie, forgot the weight on my chest.
And now, when the town resets and I walk past that old house, all I hear is that dinner echoing through the boards. Laughter tangled with grief.
A moment trapped in amber.
It wasn’t but a week later that Hannah started speakin’ to the wall.
She was only five, small enough to curl into cupboards, silent enough to vanish from a room without leaving a breath behind. But she had eyes older than any of ours. Eyes that saw beneath the veil.
One morning, I found her sittin’ by the hearth, whisperin’ to the stone.
I thought nothin’ of it at first. Children talk to shadows. But she looked too serious, too listening.
I stepped closer. “Who you talkin’ to, sweetpea?”
She blinked up at me, confused like I was the strange one.
“The man in the coat,” she said. “He was here before the town was.”
My blood ran cold.
I knelt. “What man?”
She pointed to the chimney, like someone stood just inside the stone.
“He said he was a mayor once. His name was Silas. He talks different. Like the books Mama won’t let me read.”
I swallowed hard. “And what does… Silas say?”
Hannah stared straight through me.
“He says he’s sorry.”
“Sorry for what?”
“For Lavinia,” she whispered.
Then she stood and ran out the room, as if the conversation had never happened.
I didn’t follow. I just sat there, feelin’ the chill still wrapped around the hearth. And I swear, just for a second, the smoke from the chimney curled into the shape of a man’s hat and vanished.
Elijah came not long after, like he always did.
Hannah adored him. She said he was the only one who never told her she was strange.
They played near the chapel steps, Elijah letting her braid stems of clover into his hair, quiet as stone, smiling as she laughed and danced in circles.
I remember sittin’ on the porch, watchin’ them. My heart felt lighter when he was near.
Not many in town understood Elijah, but children never questioned him. They knew what most of us forgot-
That kindness don’t always come wrapped in noise.
He protected them without sayin’ a word. Sometimes he showed up just before one of the Lorne boys got too rough with his fists. Sometimes he guided Hannah home from the forest when she wandered too deep.
He was always… there.
A shadow that never frightened. A soul made of memory.
And yet, none of us ever asked where he came from.
Or when he’d leave.
We just let him be.
And now, as I stand here telling you this, whether you’re a ghost or a girl or a god, I can still see him out there.
With her.
With Hannah.
As if time never moved forward. As if it broke and looped and broke again. And we’re all caught in the middle, waitin’ for Lavinia to finish the story.
You want to know why I linger?
Why my voice clings to this place like ivy on stone?
It ain’t just grief.
It’s guilt.
Not for what I did, but for what I let happen.
I don’t say this part aloud often. Most days I ain’t sure if it happened in the way I remember, or if time bent it to punish me.
But I know I wronged her.
I wronged Lavinia.
She weren’t ever my friend, not in the way girls braid each other’s hair and whisper secrets under the quilt. But she carried a sorrow that called to me. One I could never name, but always felt when she passed by.
She moved like a woman stitched from smoke. Always half gone, even when she stood still.
And me?
I was foolish. Foolish and selfish and lonely in the way women in closed-off towns get when they’ve buried too many dreams.
There was a man. A man with power. With a name that made folks hush when it passed through their teeth.
He came to our door in secret.
He spoke soft to me, in the dark, like I was something holy.
I let him.
I told myself I loved him. That it was love.
But it wasn’t.
It was hunger. It was need. It was fear of vanishing without ever being seen.
He never told me he belonged to her.
But I ain’t stupid. I knew.
I knew there was someone else who held his truth, even if he never named her.
Lavinia never said a word to me, not then.
But I saw the change in her eyes.
She stopped speaking to anyone for weeks. Walked the streets with her mouth sewn shut by whatever truth she’d uncovered.
And when the leaves turned gold and the first signs of rot crept into the corners of Burrington, I heard her laugh for the first time in months.
It wasn’t joy.
It was finality.
Like she’d made peace with something… terrible.
And I knew, deep in my marrow, that I had been part of her undoing.
I wish I could say the town rotted overnight.
But it didn’t.
It decayed the way apples do; one bruise, then another, until the whole orchard spoils.
The wind grew harsher. Crops failed. Three women miscarried in a single week.
Children cried at night for reasons they couldn’t explain.
The earth began to hum; not music, not words, just a low vibration under our feet like something alive and restless.
Mama said the land was trying to tell us to leave.
Papa said it was just a hard season.
But even the preacher stopped holding services.
And then we found the black birds, all perched dead on the schoolhouse steps. Not fallen. Not killed.
Just sitting.
Still.
Eyes open.
Gone.
Millie and Johnny were already buried by then.
And with them, any goodness that had once clung to Burrington.
By the time 1827 bled into the calendar, the town was more silence than sound.
The bells stopped ringing.
The parade grew smaller, then stranger. Townspeople dressed in all black with no explanation, marching with hollow eyes and locked jaws.
No music.
Just footsteps.
And whispering.
Whispers that never stopped.
Whispers from nowhere.
From beneath.
If you walked the edge of the river at dusk, you could hear a child crying.
Some said it was the girl who vanished during the founding of the land.
Some said it was Lavinia.
Others said it was the land itself.
And then… came the fire.
But you already know about the fire.
You’ve smelled it in the wind, haven’t you?
Heard it behind the church doors?
Seen it behind the eyes of the people who still smile at you like nothing ever burned?
The night before it happened, the sky turned a color we’d never seen before, like the bruised belly of a storm that wasn’t made of water or wind, but rage.
No thunder.
No rain.
Just a stillness so deep it made the birds fall silent, made the dogs whimper and dig beneath porches as if they knew.
I remember the bells.
They rang once.
Then stopped.
No hands touched them.
They just cried out.
And that was the last sound Burrington made that wasn’t a scream.
There are things I won’t tell you. Things I can’t.
Not because I’m afraid.
But because there are some memories that, if spoken, never stop bleeding.
I will say this:
It wasn’t quick.
And it wasn’t just fire.
It was neighbors turning on neighbors. Mothers shielding their children from faces they once kissed. People running from the dark and finding it waiting on every road.
Some said they saw Lavinia walking through the town square in the middle of it all. Calm. Dressed in white.
Others said she was the one who vanished first.
No one agrees.
And maybe that’s the point.
The truth got swallowed that night; burned, buried, and broken into pieces.
All we have now are echoes.
When it was over, the land was quiet again.
But not the kind of quiet that comes with peace.
It was hollow.
Like a place that had been scrubbed of time itself.
Nothing moved.
No crows. No wind. No people.
Just ash where houses once stood and faces scorched into the walls of the church.
I wandered for a while, not knowing I was already dead.
Or maybe I wasn’t, not fully.
I just remember searching. Calling out for my family. For Millie. For Johnny. For anyone who might answer.
But all I heard was the creaking of wood and the hiss of something deep beneath the ground.
They say curses take different forms.
Some wear masks.
Some whisper through generations.
And some-well, some loop.
Over.
And over.
And over.
We’re all still here.
Some of us shadows.
Some of us stories.
Some of us waiting for her.
For Lavinia.
Or… for whoever wears her face now.
I don’t know what Beck is.
But I know she’s close to the truth.
And the land?
The land knows too.
It remembers.
It always remembers.
And when she wakes again, when the day resets and the fog lifts-
It’ll begin again.
As it always does.
As it always must.
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This isn’t just a story… it’s a whole world unraveling. Welcome to it.
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