I hear his buggy leaving.”
Leanna obeyed, though every cell in her body protested chasing after Gabriel’s buggy. As she ran out of the house, she wondered if someone falling off a building felt like she did. She couldn’t fight the idea she was rushing headlong into her doom, but how could she do nothing when those adorable bopplin needed someone to watch them?
She doubted she would have caught up enough for him to hear her shouts over the clatter of the wheels on the stones if their puppy, Penny, hadn’t raced past her, barking.
When Gabriel slowed the buggy so he didn’t hit the dog, Leanna shouted. He drew in the horse. As the buggy rolled to a stop, she ran to the driver’s side.
“Is something wrong?” he asked. “Is it your grossmammi?”
“She’s fine.” She panted between each word. “She sent me to ask you to come back.”
“Why?”
“Let’s talk in the kitchen.”
Her younger brother and sister nudged each other and grinned as they walked past the buggy. They thought she’d stepped up to help because she had a crush on Gabriel. Would they understand if she explained she saw this as a way to get him out of her heart?
Leanna hoped Gabriel hadn’t noticed her siblings’ silliness. He motioned for her to step out of the way so he could turn the buggy toward the house.
Minutes later, she was holding Harley in the kitchen while Annie kept Heidi entertained with a game of peekaboo. Gabriel stood by the table and looked from her grossmammi to her, perplexed.
When Grossmammi Inez motioned, Leanna said, “Gabriel, we know you need help with your kinder. We’ve come up a solution we hope will work for you. Juanita wants to help once school is out.”
“When’s that?”
“A little over two weeks. Until then,” she said quickly before gut sense halted her, “I’m willing to step in. I can milk my goats before I go to your house, and I can find someone to take over my cleaning jobs.”
“The rest of us will pitch in,” Annie said, not pausing in her game with Heidi. “So do you want Leanna’s help now and Juanita’s later?”
“I do,” he replied, his voice thick with relief.
Leanna blinked back abrupt tears when she heard Gabriel speak the words she had longed to hear him say, though not standing in her family’s kitchen with his two kinder. She had to forget that absurd fantasy of having a happily-ever-after with him if she wanted to make this temporary situation work. She wasn’t sure how she was going to let that dream go, but she must.
Four hours of sleep...
He would have settled for three.
In a row.
Gabriel stared at the blackened pan and wondered how he could have fallen half-asleep standing by the stove. The four eggs he’d been frying looked as if they’d been dunked in soot. Smoke hung in the air, though he’d opened the kitchen window over the sink. Beneath heavy eyelids, he considered the stacks of dishes waiting to be washed. Maybe the smoke couldn’t find its way past them.
Now there was another to add to the ones he needed to scour. He should have known better than to offer to make breakfast when he couldn’t string two thoughts together.
Freda would have been horrified by the state of the kitchen. His late wife had jested over and over she wanted a house where a speck of dust wouldn’t feel at home. After she’d died, Gabriel had wondered if she’d been joking. She had insisted on everything being in its place. A single glass askew in a cupboard had bothered her so much she couldn’t eat before straightening it. The slightest disruption in her day sent her into a dark mood he couldn’t draw her out of until she was ready to emerge.
When he and Michael had first gone to live with Freda’s family after their own parents died, Freda Girod had been a happy little girl. Like her daughter, Heidi, she’d always found fun in every experience.
The Girod family had lived on the neighboring farm, so it had been a simple transition for the Miller twins to move next door. When the Miller farm was sold, the community had assumed the money would be used to raise the eight-year-olds. Instead, Aden Girod, Freda’s daed, had put the funds into the bank and brought up the two boys along with his daughter, who was four years younger.
The money, which Aden had called their inheritance, was to be put toward buying a farm for the twins to share. He’d refused to let either Gabriel or Michael use it to help offset his medical bills piling up on the small table in the kitchen. The cancer treatments would be covered by the community, and Aden wanted “his boys,” as he’d always called them, to have a gut start in life with a farm of their own.
Then, one night, Aden had asked Gabriel to take a walk with him along the line of trees separating the Girod farm from the one where the Miller twins had been born. He had something he wanted to discuss with Gabriel. Jumping at the chance to talk alone with the man he considered his daed, Gabriel had decided it would be the perfect time to tell Aden about his hopes of marrying Leanna Wagler.
He never had the chance.
Aden had opened the conversation by saying if Gabriel married his daughter, the Girod farm would be his when Aden died from his cancer, as his doktors feared would happen within the year. The inheritance money from the twins’ parents could then be Michael’s, and perhaps he could find a nearby farm so the brothers could raise their kinder together.
When Gabriel asked why Aden was making such an extraordinary offer when he had a daughter to inherit his farm, he’d answered, “Because I want my kins-kinder to grow up on a family farm as my daughter did. There’s not much time left to make sure that happens.”
“The doktors have been wrong before,” Gabriel had begun.
“I’m not talking about my cancer. I’m talking about Freda’s situation.” His voice had dropped to a whisper. “I know I should have been stricter with her when her rumspringa friends started spending time with Englisch boys.”
Gabriel had almost asked when that had begun but didn’t, ashamed to admit he’d been so caught up with his courtship of Leanna he hadn’t been paying much attention to anything else. “You’re a gut daed, Aden,” was all he’d been able to find to say, eager to finish discussing Aden’s daughter and move the conversation to discussing asking Leanna to marry him.
“If I’d been a better daed, maybe Freda wouldn’t be pregnant.”
“Pregnant?” That had stopped Gabriel in his tracks.
“The Englischer who she says is the daed has refused to marry her.” He turned to face Gabriel. “How can I accept God’s will that I soon will depart from this world when I have to leave my daughter in such a predicament on her own?”
“I’m so sorry.” Then he’d spoken the words that shattered
