Chapter 6
The barn in the early morning had a calming quality that Jodie had loved since she was a young child.
The light filtered through the gaps between the wallboards in long, pale slats, catching the dust motes hanging in the air and turning the building into something almost golden, so the whole space seemed to glow from the inside out.
The hay in the loft smelled of summer, still, even in the last week of September—warm, dry, and sweet, with a faint undercurrent of clover that had been mixed in.
The horses moved softly in their stalls below, nickering every now and then.
A large barn cat, orange and white, sat on the ledge of the half-door and watched the world with the authority of one who considered the entire farm his personal jurisdiction.
Jodie had come to fetch the heavy quilt she kept stored in the hayloft, the one her mother had stitched the year before she passed—a log cabin pattern in blues and greens, made from the worn-out dresses of three generations of Graber women.
She brought it down every autumn when the nights turned cold enough to justify it, and every spring she carried it back up to the loft and folded it into the cedar chest where the mice could not reach it.
It was one of her small rituals, a thing she did for herself, and she preferred to do it alone.
She had not expected Lloyd to be in the barn.
He was below her, in the wide center aisle between the stalls, working a currycomb along the flank of David’s old bay gelding with slow, even strokes.
The gelding stood with his head low and his eyes half closed, entirely content to feel the comb on his coat.
Lloyd’s sleeves were rolled to the elbows, and the early light caught the pale hair on his forearms and the line of his shoulders as he worked.
He had not heard her come in. He was speaking to the horse, very quietly—a low, steady murmur about nothing of note, the weather, the grain, and whether the gelding thought the fence post in the lower paddock would last another winter or needed replacing before the snow came.
Jodie stood at the top of the hayloft ladder and watched him for a moment longer than was strictly necessary.
She was aware of what she was doing, and that watching a man curry a horse should not produce the warm tightness she could now feel beneath her ribs.
She also knew that she was expecting another man’s child and that there was a woman in Pennsylvania laying claim to the man below her.
She understood that the claim had not yet been resolved and that the sensible thing, the only thing, was to fetch the quilt quickly, go back to the house, and stop looking at the way his muscular shoulders tensed with each stroke of the currycomb, or at the way the light reflected on his hair.
She couldn’t deny that now, with Lloyd better, he was an extremely handsome man, but neither could she deny that he might be promised to another.
She did not stop looking; she simply could not stop looking.
Gott, she thought, with a kind of weary resignation. You are not making this easy for me.
Lloyd glanced up.
Their eyes met in the barn’s dusty golden air, and for a moment neither of them spoke. Lloyd’s hand had stilled on the gelding’s flank. The currycomb hung in midair, forgotten for a moment. Something passed across his face—not surprise, exactly, but a kind of sharp, quiet attention.
“Guten Mariye,” Jodie said from the top of the ladder, in a voice she was moderately pleased with for its steadiness.
“Guten mariye.” He cleared his throat. “Es dutt mer leed. I did not hear you come in.”
“Ach, you were in deep conversation with Solomon. I did not want to interrupt. You were discussing the fence post in the lower paddock, I think.”
A faint pink color spread across his face, along with the almost-smile she had been privately observing for the past week—the way it began at the corner of his mouth and slowly spread outward, like the sun breaking through a gap in the clouds.
“He’s a gut listener,” Lloyd answered. “He does not argue with me, not ever.”
“That is more than can be said of most.”
She turned to the cedar chest in the corner of the loft and lifted the lid.
It creaked as she spotted the quilt inside, folded in tissue paper the way her mother had always kept it.
It smelled faintly of cedar, lavender, and the clean sweetness of fabric that had been loved and handled many times.
She gathered it into her arms. It was heavier than she remembered, or perhaps she was simply more tired than she was willing to admit.
When she straightened, the weight shifted awkwardly against the bump of her baby, and she had to take a step backward to steady herself.
It was then that he felt it—a fragment of something, arriving without warning. Not quite a memory. More like the ghost of one. A voice, and the voice was his own, saying words he did not recognize.
I am meant to care for her.
Lloyd went very still beside the gelding’s stall.
The fragment had come and gone in an instant, leaving only the certainty that it was true, though he did not know where it had come from or what it meant.
He looked up at Jodie in the hayloft, her arms full of the heavy quilt, the morning light catching the chestnut of her hair and the curve of her belly beneath her apron.
The words sat in his chest as though they had always been there and were only now making themselves known.
At that moment, her foot slipped on the worn rung of the ladder.
He was moving before he knew what he was doing.
Three long strides across the barn floor, arms outstretched, and Jodie came down into them rather than onto the hard, cold stone floor.
The quilt fell between them in a billow of blue and green fabric, smelling of cedar and lavender.
The impact staggered him back half a step.
He caught his balance against the near stall post and held on.
They stood pressed together for a single shocked moment.
Her hands had come up and gripped his forearms, hard, and she could feel the taut muscle and the tension beneath the rolled cotton of his sleeves.
His arms were around her, one at her back and the other beneath the curve of her belly where she had been falling.
His heart was hammering against the inside of his chest so hard that she could feel it through the quilt and the small space of warm air between them.
His face was very close. So close she could see the pale line of the scar along his jaw, the individual lashes around his striking green eyes, and the way his breath had become short and quick.
She looked at him.
His eyes, this close, were not simply green. They were the precise shade of Crystal Lake water in late summer.
“Well,” she said, and her voice was only slightly breathless. “That was providential.”
He could not speak, simply managing a nod.
“The boppli is fine too,” she added, because one of them needed to say something practical, and it was clearly going to have to be her. “I think she is a little annoyed by my sudden movement, but she is fine.”
Lloyd nodded again. He was aware, with a disorienting clarity, that he did not want to let her go.
That the warmth of her against his body, the grip of her hands on his arms, and the impossible, impractical, entirely unreasonable closeness of her face were things he wanted to keep, and that this was a very significant problem for a man who did not know his own history and had no right to want anything at all from anyone.
Finally, he did release her. Stepping back, he cleared his throat.
Jodie straightened her apron, smoothing it across her belly.
She bent, carefully, and picked up the quilt from the barn floor, brushing off the detritus from the ground.
She folded it over her arm, ready to carry it back to the house.
She was flushed, and she was not looking at him; the barn was suddenly very quiet, as though even the horses and the disreputable ginger cat had decided to give this moment the privacy it required.
“Denki, for catching me. That would not have been… that would not have been very gut if I had landed on these hard stones,” she said, waving her hands at the slabs.
“Nee.” His voice came out rougher than he had intended. He tried again. “Nee. It most certainly would not have been.”
She looked at him then, and her blue eyes held something he could not quite read—gratitude, yes, and something warmer beneath it, something that made the air between them suddenly feel close and charged.
She opened her mouth to say something more, but the barn door swung open, banging against the wall with force.
The woman who stood in the doorway was not tall, but she held herself as though she were. She was perhaps twenty-eight or twenty-nine, dark-haired, sharp-featured, and dressed in the plain clothes of an Amish woman.
Her hands were fixed at her hips. Her chin was lifted. Her expression was that of a woman who had traveled some distance to find something she considered hers and had just walked in on a scene that confirmed her worst suspicion.
“Lloyd Kauffman,” she said. Her voice was clear and carried flat, practical tones, without apology. “I have been looking for you for months.”
The barn was very still and quiet
Lloyd’s face had gone entirely blank. It was not the blankness of shock, exactly, though there was shock in it. It was the blankness of a man caught between two things, unsure which way to turn because both directions contained something he was not ready to face.
He looked at the woman in the doorway. He looked at Jodie, then looked back at the woman.
“Susan,” he said.
The name came out of him in surprise. He knew it the way he knew his own—with certainty, but he couldn’t understand why.
He couldn’t have said, at that moment, what Susan Bontrager was to him, or what he had been to her.
He knew only that she was standing in the barn doorway with her hands on her hips and her eyes full of a complicated fury, and that Jodie Schwartz was standing three feet away from him, her expression one of utter bemusement.
“You know my name,” Susan said. “Well, that is a start. I was told you had lost your memory. I was not sure how much of that to believe.” She stepped into the barn.
Her boots were dusty from the road, and her clothing was creased.
“We have a great deal to discuss, Lloyd. A very great deal. And I have come a very long way to discuss it with you.”
Jodie took a quiet step back. She held the quilt against her chest as though it were a shield, and the warmth that had been on her face a moment before—the color, the openness, the unguarded softness of the almost-something that had passed between them—had gone as quickly as it had arrived.
In its place was something still, composed, and very, very careful.
“I will leave you to your visitor,” she said to Lloyd, her voice giving nothing away. “The kucke is available if you need it. I will let Daed know we have a guest.”
She walked past Susan Bontrager in a steady, unhurried manner. She wasn’t going to give the woman the satisfaction of seeing her scurry away. She didn’t look back either.
In the yard, in the bright late-September morning, she pressed the quilt to her face and breathed in the cedar and lavender and the ghost of her mother’s hands. She stood there for a long moment, quite still, with the hills on either side of the valley and the sky wide, blue, and totally empty.
Well, she said silently to the Gott she had been arguing with all autumn. I suppose I should have been more specific about the sign.
Then she straightened her shoulders, lifted her chin, and walked into the house to put the kettle on. Her mother would have done just that, and Jodie Schwartz did not yet know what else to do with her heart that had been cracked open and was now shutting again.