The Lookback (The Birch Creek Ranch Series Book 8)

Prologue Mandy

Most families have some thing that makes them different from other families. The Brooks family boys dominated in most every sport. The Gibbens family found trash that no one wanted and managed to use it for something unexpected. The Davis family loves to cook and bake. The Duttons love to argue.

My family has its thing, just like any other, only, no one knew. Or, whatever they thought our thing was, it really wasn’t. From the time I was old enough to understand anything at all about the world, I was taught what it took to be a successful member of the Saddler family.

We were liars. Accomplished liars.

Never in a way that hurt someone else. That was our one guiding principle, really. If a lie stole something, hurt someone, or did obvious damage? No, no, double no. But as long as no one was hurt by the exaggeration, it was not only allowed, it was downright encouraged.

I didn’t even find out what my real name should have been until I turned eighteen. That’s when my mom sat me down and explained that my dad had been a hero—he’d stood up to the Red Army’s invasion of our home country, Latvia. But they had eventually lost against the swelling tide of Russians that spilled across our border, eager to trample Latvia in their attempt to face off against Germany.

What really happened when my family left Latvia, no one will ever know for sure. My family’s propensity to embellish was too firmly rooted by then for me to have any hope of sussing out the unvarnished truth. But I’m reasonably sure that my father fled Latvia just in time to escape, and that he brought my mother to America right as this fledgling nation was preparing to enter the same war he’d just avoided. He wasn’t keen on rejoining it from a new position.

To avoid being sent back to Europe to join the fray as a United States citizen, he entered illegally, somehow finding what I’m quite sure were fraudulent papers on his way out West. Manila was a new town and it needed men madly—my dad could work wonders with leather, especially saddle repairs. Eventually he began crafting saddles himself. Although he also ran cows on our land, the majority of our income came from his saddle repairs. It was only natural that our family should shed its prior name that was bizarre in this country—Liepa—and adopt a new one that people had no trouble with: Saddler.

It was also the best kind of marketing in that era.

And so it was that, when my mother was nearly ready to give birth to me, my father loaded her into our old Ford Standard and started out for the hospital. It was a fluke that Jedediah’s mother happened to be almost ready to burst as well, and with her husband needing to watch their older child, little Clyde, we offered to give her a ride over.

When I was born on September 25 of 1944, Jedediah and I were only the third and fourth babies delivered in the brand new Roosevelt Hospital, a solid ninety plus miles to the south of our family ranch outside of Manila. The name my parents put on my birth certificate, just in case anyone was paying attention, wasn’t Amanda Liepa. It was Amanda Saddler.

That’s how I started my life with a lie, and my parents made sure that I learned to proceed that way whenever the truth would be inconvenient, embarrassing, or in any way undesirable.

It took me a very long time to realize the error of that line of thinking. A very long time. I’ve always said that no villain can do as much damage to a person as their own family, and that’s not a lie.

I still blame them for the worst lie I ever told. As with most things, I didn’t realize it was such a damaging lie until long after I told it.