“I’ll check on the girls,” Leah said, seeming to understand. “You take as long as you want.” She slipped out quickly.
Alone, Rebecca slid down on the floor next to the trunk, her hand resting on the Sunshine and Shadows quilt that lay on top. Sunshine and Shadows, she repeated silently. There had been mostly shadows for so long. She longed to believe the sunshine was coming back to their lives.
As for talking about it...how could she tell anyone? Mamm and Daadi hadn’t wanted her to marry James so quickly, to go so far away with someone they barely knew. But she’d been captivated by James’s charm and his lively, daring personality.
She didn’t know then about the quick temper that seemed to be a part of him. It had flared rarely in the first years of their marriage, and each time it did, she’d made excuses for him.
And then had come the accident. James’s daring had led him a little too far, determined to climb to the top of the windmill to repair it, unwilling to wait for someone to come help him. And annoyed with her when she tried to stop him.
So she’d stood, watching, wondering what made him so eager to take risks. Then... Her memory winced away from the image of him falling, falling...
Everyone, even the doctors, said he was fortunate to be alive. That his injuries would heal, and he’d be himself again.
But he wasn’t. After the injury to his head, James seemed to lose all control. His rages were terrifying. If she dared try to calm him, he’d turn on her. Lige had become a little mouse, always afraid, trying so hard not to do anything to bring on the anger. And she hadn’t been much better.
Until the day he’d almost struck Lige with his fist. Then she had found the courage to fight back. When his family seemed unable to help, she’d dared to go to the bishop.
Bishop Paul had been everything that was kind. He’d insisted that James go for treatment, making all the arrangements himself. For a time, the treatment helped. The rages became a thing of the past, and it had seemed a blessing to be able to hope again.
Then it had all fallen apart. James had lost his temper with a half-trained horse, determined to force it to obey. The animal had reared, striking out, and in a moment, James was gone.
Rebecca pressed her fingers to her eyes, willing the images away. James was gone, but the damage he’d done lived on after him, it seemed.
No. She forced herself to stand, to wipe the tears from her face. That was the past. It was over and done with. She and Lige had a new start here, and they would make the best of it. But she would never again make the mistake of trusting a man with their lives.
When Daniel turned into the lane and drew the horse to a halt at the back door of Rebecca’s new house, the troubling thoughts about her returned in full force. Onkel Zeb, sitting next to him on the wagon seat, started to get down and then looked at him.
“Was ist letz? Is something wrong?”
“No, no.” He secured the lines and scolded himself for daydreaming. “It’s nothing. I can unload myself, if you have something else to do.” He’d appreciated the company on the trip to the hardware store and lumberyard for the materials he’d need for Rebecca’s job, but he didn’t want to keep his uncle working all day.
Onkel Zeb, as lean and tough as he always was, hopped down nimbly. “Nothing as interesting as this,” he said, heading for the back of the wagon. “I want to see what you and Rebecca are going to do to this place. Mason Evans let it go those last few years, that’s certain sure.”
“He didn’t seem to have much energy for it after his wife passed, did he? But we’ll get it fixed up fine.” He slid a couple of two-by-fours off the wagon and balanced them on his shoulder. “If you’ll get the door, I’ll take the bigger pieces in. Rebecca said she’d leave it unlocked for us.”
Nodding, Zeb stepped up to the porch and swung the door open. “I was hoping Rebecca would be here when we got back. I haven’t seen her yet. How is she looking?”
Daniel moved past him to start a stack of the lumber inside while he considered how to answer that question. “All right, I guess,” he muttered.
His uncle propped the door open before turning to give him a probing look. “Seems to me you’re not so sure about that, ain’t so?”
He should have known there was no getting away with evasions where Onkel Zeb was concerned. He’d been like a father to all three boys, especially after their mother left and their own daad just seemed to fall apart at the loss.
Don’t go down that road, he told himself. This is about Rebecca, not you.
“Truth to tell, I’m not sure.” He pulled another couple of posts out and hesitated. “She’s so thin and pale I almost didn’t know her. It’s not so long since her husband died, so I guess that’s natural, but...”
“But what?” Onkel Zeb leaned against the buggy, ready to listen as always.
Daniel frowned absently at the boards. “Seemed like her whole personality has changed from what she was. She was all tense and keyed up, and the boy... He seemed almost scared.”
“Of you?”
Daniel shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe of everything. Just didn’t seem right.” He eyed his uncle thoughtfully. “You and Josiah Fisher are pretty close. He say anything to you about Rebecca?”
Onkel Zeb hesitated so long Daniel thought he wasn’t going to answer. Finally he spoke. “Josiah and Ida have been worried about Rebecca for a while now, her being so far away that they couldn’t help as much as they wanted when she had all this trouble.”
That wasn’t really an answer, and they both knew it. “So why did they start worrying to begin with?”
“What do you remember about when Rebecca got married?” Onkel Zeb answered the question with a question.
Daniel cast his mind back. “I remember she went away that summer—out to Ohio to help a cousin of hers who was moving. She stayed quite a time, and then we heard she’d met someone and was going to marry him.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Funny. We’d always been such gut friends, but she didn’t write to me about him at all.”
“That was the summer you were chasing after Betty Ann Stoltzfus,” Onkel Zeb put in. “Maybe you were too busy to pay much attention to what Rebecca was up to.”
Daniel had a moment’s gratitude for the fact that he’d broken it off with Betty Ann when he did. They wouldn’t have suited anyway, and it was not long afterward that his little brother, Aaron, took off for the Englisch world, tearing up his heart.
Onkel Zeb made a sound that expressed his general disapproval of Betty Ann. “Anyway, Josiah and Ida didn’t want her to get married so quick, especially to someone they hardly knew, who lived so far away. But she was determined, so they accepted the best they could.”
“Rebecca being the only daughter, I guess it’s natural they’d want her to stay close.” He picked up another armload of planks. It had begun to sound as if Onkel Zeb was doing a good bit of talking around the subject, maybe not wanting to repeat anything Josiah said about his daughter in confidence.
“Yah.” Zeb slid out some of the smaller pieces and a box of nails and followed him to the house. “Natural, like you say. They always thought maybe you and Rebecca would make a match of it, as close as you were.”
That startled him. He’d never imagined anyone could be thinking that. “We were friends, that’s all,” he said quickly. “Neither of us ever thought of anything else.”
There was a skeptical expression on Onkel Zeb’s