A Perfect Secret by Kelly Long

Author:Kelly Long
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2013-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

Luke knew he was dreaming, but he was too caught, too enmeshed in the images playing inside his mind to force himself to wake. He was losing Rose in a thousand different ways; fast-forwarded images—Rose in a boat on storm-tossed waves drifting away from him, the eerie lights of a carnival’s Ferris wheel and Rose spinning high to the top in a swinging singsong motion, Rose standing on the edge of a cavernous drop while he tried desperately to reach her. Everything that was human in him recognized the fear, the distance, and he knew he had to tell her the whole truth. It was the only way he was going to be able to stay close to her, but when he opened his mouth to speak, he awoke shivering and knew that dawn couldn’t come fast enough.

•••

“Sure you’re not getting sick, Rosie?” her father asked with genuine concern when she appeared wan and sleepy at the breakfast table.

“Nee, Daed.” Though she wondered if she actually was sick, as awful as she felt inside. She had spent the night clutching the child’s drawing, examining it by the light of a kerosene lamp from every angle, and was no nearer the truth than she had been standing outside the shack the night before.

She tried to think logically. Ally was not a traditional Amish name, yet she had no doubt the drawing had been a gift of some kind to Luke. It must have slipped from his jeans pocket when he fell. She noticed that the child had drawn faces on the clouds, so that their raindrops looked like tears. What would clouds weep for? And for so young a life’s imagination?

And then that single word: Daddy. The letters had rung through Rose’s mind with all the cadence of a loud and clanging bell, merciless in intensity and reverberating possibility. Luke was twenty-three . . . The child had to be at least four or five, judging from her letter formation . . . That would make Luke eighteen if he were . . . She couldn’t finish the thought, not once the whole night through nor now as she tried to concentrate on her scrambled eggs.

But like a bad canker sore that attracts the tongue, her mind kept running over the possibilities with drawing pain. She and Luke had both had a rumschpringe, but it had been nothing like some she knew. At least for her it hadn’t been . . . She’d ridden in a car once, gone to two Englisch baseball games, and stayed out all night singing round a campfire with some of her Amish friends. She racked her brain for what Luke had been doing and realized she couldn’t fill in all the blanks of time. He’d been to her then what he always was . . . devoted. But friendship or not, she didn’t see him all the time. Could he have met an Englisch girl? Could he have had a relationship that she didn’t

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