Free Summer of Secrets by Charlotte Hubbard

the wall of smiling faces, allowing the images to settle their nerves. Bob Oliveri let out a long sigh and began to point at them. “This was when Tiffany played T-ball in grade school. Quite a little athlete she was, too!” he said proudly. “And this was her dog, Ozzie. Just a mutt, but we were devastated when we had to put him down a few years ago.”
    “ Jah , I can understand that.” Miriam couldn’t stop gazing at her daughter’s face: the hairstyles changed and she wore a little striped uniform, or a checkered dress with a large white collar, or later a red cap and gown at her graduation, but those eyes ... those dimples and that smile spoke volumes that only a mother’s heart could hear. “I gotta tell ya, though, it threw me for a loop when she told us ya lived in Morning Star. Last I saw of her, she was caught up in the current, racing downriver—”
    “We lived south of New Haven then.” Bob’s face tightened and for a moment he seemed unable to speak. “Couldn’t believe my eyes when I went chasing after Ozzie that day. He was just a puppy and scared of such a storm—”
    “ Jah , it was an awful day! Blew up so sudden-like, I grabbed the girls and hurried up the muddy riverbank—”
    “—and there on a big tree trunk was a little girl in a pink dress!” he said in a rush. His pale face flushed with his excitement as he relived that fateful moment. “I grabbed a leafy branch and hauled her in, and—well, Janet said it was a sign from God! We ... we’d lost a little girl about a month before and ...”
    When he hung his head, Miriam gently grasped his hand. “I know all about how hard that is,” she whispered. “Thought it was my fault when Rebecca broke away from me that day. Blamed myself that I was near the river, lookin’ for their dat . When our friends and family searched in all the towns downriver from Willow Ridge, and came back without her, well ... we assumed the worst.”
    The man beside her pressed his lips into a tight line. “What we did probably sounds ... unthinkable to you, ma’am. But we loved her so much—so immediately—we didn’t try to find where she might’ve come from. The timing was too perfect to be coincidence. Janet had just gotten a new job a little ways north of here, so we moved away from New Haven. A fresh start as a new family, you see.”
    Why didn’t they contact the local authorities? Say they’d found a child washed away by the river? she thought harshly. But then she blinked back more tears. My side of the story no doubt sounds just as unbelievable to him. We Amish keep our problems to ourselves. The bishop insisted we not notify the police, either ...
    Miriam held her breath. Bob Oliveri was not only a man who’d lost his mate and, long ago, a baby daughter; he was a man who’d apparently kept a secret even more complicated than her own. She nodded mutely to encourage him. If she interrupted with questions, he might never finish what felt like a confession welling up from a troubled soul. “We all gotta move on,” she murmured. “Hard as that is sometimes.”
    With a grateful nod, he blew his nose in his damp handkerchief. “Please understand, we didn’t act as we did to hurt you , Mrs. Lantz,” he continued in a strained voice. “But because this little girl was so like our own lost lamb, we called her by the same name ...”
    His eyes took on a faraway look. “She said right off she liked the name Tiffany, when we told her about our other little girl. We—we would never have forced her to go by something different, had she insisted on her real name.”
    Miriam laughed softly. “She couldn’t say her R ’s. Rachel and Rhoda were ahead of her learnin’ to talk, too, and she didn’t like that one little bit.”
    “So by moving to a new town, you met new friends who believed Tiffany was—had always been—yours?” Sheila inquired gently.
    “You’ll never know how that little girl restored our spirits—our will to get on