Free Abram's Daughters 05 The Revelation by Unknown Page A

away from the house. She wc|>l angry tears, infrequently brushing them away with the back of her hand, letting most fall freely. She felt she was rebelling somehow ii|',.iinst nature and the Lord God who'd fashioned her in His own iiu.ige, with tears and emotions beyond her control. She walked as I.i.m as she could to try to drive away the painful feelings, unable to i".( .ipe them no matter how swiftly she went. "Jake . . . oh, Jake."
    She passed the woods on her right and Dr. Schwartz's clinic on t he left as she came up on the crest of the hill where the road fell xlowly yet decidedly toward the area known as Grasshopper Level. She slowed her pace somewhat, contemplating just where it was she wanted to go or if she really wanted to go anywhere at all.
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    Stopping now, she thought what it would be like to walk all the way to the Masts' orchard house. But what good would that do? Jake would wonder why she was there . . . ask why she looked so disheveled, with swollen eyes and a face streaked with tears. He would press for answers and she might give in, breaking her promise to Mamma Leah and Sadie. Nothing good could possibly come of that. . . could it?
    Standing there in the road, she brooded further on the possible consequences of Jake's hearing from her his own aunt, of all things that he was not his parents' son at all, but the child of a woman he did not know and had been kept from knowing since Sadie and her family had always been off limits to him. Out-and-out shunned.
    Things don't add up, she thought sorrowfully. Why does one family reject another?
    All in, she turned to go back home, hardly able now to make her legs move. If what Sadie and Mamma Leah had shared with her was true and she knew better than to doubt their word she had no choice but to break things off with Jake.
    She knew she could not do that today, nor tomorrow. Just when she would bring herself to turn her back on him, she didn't know. She almost wished his dear face repulsed her, but as she again considered the shocking news that he was indeed Sadie's own son, she was moved to further tears. She also felt an unexpected sorrow for Sadie, who had never been able to know her only living child.
    Why, O God, should something this dreadful happen to me? To all of us?
    Henry gathered up all the trash from the house and dragged it out to the receptacle in the garage. He shuffled back to the clinic, aware of some movement in the air, more subtle than a breeze, and he wondered if it was a figment of his imagination. The ghost of Henry past, perhaps. He deserved any haunting he might encounter, even welcomed the notion of rebuke by an accusing spirit.
    Inside his office, he picked up the small waste basket and went from examining rooms to the patients' waiting room, not looking
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    forward to Leah's arrival at work tomorrow. He speculated on what hc might have to say about his giving Lydiann and Jake a lift.
    I lie sight of the young Amish couple together on the road earlier loday had put him in something of a panic, even though he was tonvineed he had concealed it well. However, he /^/experienced a urnsai ion of nausea, and the more he became aware of the pair's anil naicd whispering in the backseat behind him, the more discoursed he'd become.
    All my doing. . .
    I1 seemed as if he had mentally repeated the logic, or lack thereof, in choosing Peter and Fannie Mast to raise and nurture Niulie and Derek's illegitimate infant thousands of times. Had it her i) the wrong thing to place Derek's firstborn in the arms of birthwcary Fannie . . . tricking her into thinking she had indeed birthed
    I1 if gangly and gaunt boy? A counterfeit twin to Amanda, with not a m i up of resemblance to her in build or facial features. Truth be known, Jake was the spitting image of his biological father, Henry's Mvond son.
    vSo Henry had committed the riskiest act he had ever elected to
    11< >; one he had concurrently lamented and praised, unknown to any< >11c but Leah or so he