Anna's Return by Marta Perry Read Free Book Online Page B

roommate, had a boyfriend. Pete, his name is. He was in and out of trouble all the time, mostly for selling drugs.”
    Daad shook his head slowly, not in disbelief but in sorrow, it seemed. “That is a bad thing, it is.”
    “Jannie got pregnant, and I could see something wasn’t right.” That was one benefit of growing up Amish. She’d been around enough pregnant females, animal and human, to know what was normal. “I got her to go to the clinic. They found she had leukemia.”
    Someone around the table sucked in a breath. Leah. “Poor thing.”
    “Ja,” Myra said softly.
    “When she told Pete, he couldn’t handle it. He just wanted out.” She was consolidating into a few sentences the weeks of anguish, of comforting Jannie and trying to see the path ahead.
    “Jannie . . .” How could she make them understand a waif like Jannie, rootless in an uncaring world? “She didn’t have anyone. No family, no one who could help. When she lost Pete, she was desperate.”
    “So you helped her.”
    If there was a trace of surprise in Daadi’s voice, she decided to ignore it.
    “I was all she had.” She took a shaky breath. “When she realized she wasn’t going to live, all she wanted was to know that her baby would be safe.” Jannie, who’d never seemed to have a mind of her own about anything, had proved unexpectedly strong when it came to her baby. “She asked me to raise her child, and I promised that I would. The nurse put Gracie into my arms minutes after she was born.” She dropped a kiss on Gracie’s hair, inhaling the sweet baby scent. “I knew she was mine in that moment.”
    A faint murmur of understanding came from the other women. Barbara nodded. They knew that moment.
    Daadi was frowning, though. “What about the father? He has the right to his own child.”
    She bit back angry words. They wouldn’t help. Daadi could never really understand a man who would put his next fix ahead of his child. Daadi would always try to be fair, even to someone like Pete.
    “He didn’t want her.” She cradled Gracie in her arms. That was true. Pete hadn’t wanted the baby. “He signed the papers giving her away. She’s my child, both in law and in my heart.”
    Her words seemed to linger in the silence that greeted them. She pressed one hand against the rough wood of the picnic table, willing someone to speak. No one did.
    Rebellion rose in her. “You’d be happier if I came back an unwed mother,” she snapped. “Would that be easier to forgive?”
    “Don’t, Anna.” Leah might have been chiding a fifteen-year-old Anna for hiding English clothes in the barn. “You know that’s not so. We’re just trying to understand, ain’t so?” Leah glanced around the table, seeking agreement.
    Several heads nodded. Mahlon, her next-older brother, usually so happy-go-lucky, still looked faintly shocked, but he nodded, too.
    To her surprise, it was Barbara who reached over to pat her hand. “You love her, whether she came from your body or not.”
    “Ja,” she said softly. “Denke, Barbara.” Too often her annoyance with Barbara’s nosiness made her overlook the woman’s warm heart.
    “The Stoltzfus family, over by Big Creek, they adopted three English kinder,” Samuel said, dropping the words in quietly.
    “Ja, but they are a married couple.” Mahlon glanced at his young wife, as if trying to gauge her opinion.
    “You’ve all accepted my three young ones as family,” Daniel, Leah’s husband, said, wrapping his hand around hers. A blind person could see how much those two loved each other. To think she’d once been furious with Leah for considering marriage to Daniel.
    “If the law agrees the baby is Anna’s,” Joseph said, “then we’ll have no quarrel with the English over it.”
    Anna should have been grateful for their support. She was, for Gracie’s sake. But still her rebellious spirit rose. They all thought they had a share and a say in her life. That was what she’d jumped the