“Maybe it has,” I agreed. “But if so, I will not do as she did and slip away in the dead of night. If I leave, I will leave honorably.”
Fresh tears were now rimming Rachel’s eyes, which were wide with surprise and dread. She didn’t say what she had every right to, that there was nothing honorable about leading a girl on for years, implying marriage, only to desert her when it finally came time to take that next step.
I swallowed back the guilt that surged in my throat.
“So you are saying a life here with me, and our children, Lord willing, would not be enough for you?” Her voice was tender but trembling. “That I would not be enough?”
If I could have set a match to the warring thoughts in my head, I would have done it right then. But I couldn’t.
I saw in her eyes every meaningful time she and I had ever shared. Ten thousand conversations, ten thousand laughs, ten thousand common moments. I had never wanted any other woman besides her. I didn’t even know when it was I fell in love with her because I hadn’t fallen at all. She had been my constant, my one true love, from the very beginning.
“I want it to be enough,” I whispered. “I do.” Even as I spoke, I was reminded suddenly of that long-ago conversation with Sarah, when she told me that the Amish life had not been “enough” for my mother. Was that really why she had left?
Was that what would end up keeping me away as well?
Rachel studied my face, searching to reconnect with the boy she had grown up with, loved, and with whom she wanted to spend her life. Then she turned and walked to the cluster of large rocks and sat, her expression bereft, her big blue eyes filled with the hurt my actions were causing. My heart nearly crushing under the weight of my own remorse, I hesitated only a moment before I went to her, took a seat at her side, and wrapped my arm around her shoulders. We sat there together that way for a long time, both of us quiet, until the sky was a deep purple and the first evening star appeared above the shadows of the horizon.
“I want you to be sure,” she said finally, her voice soft but resolute. “I want you to regret nothing. Ever. Go to your father’s, Tyler. Do what you need to do. Follow God’s will, not mine.”
Nor mine, I prayed, drawing her into an embrace and holding on as tightly as I could.
Monday afternoon, I set my nearly packed duffel bag on the floor and then surveyed my bedroom, which suddenly seemed small and bland and devoid of the life—the lives—that had been lived here over the years. The Amish way, of course, was to keep possessions to a minimum, to avoid ornate decorations or mementoes or photographs. Usually, such simplicity gave me a feeling of peace. On this day, however, it brought only one word to mind: Empty. Like a flashing neon sign. Empty. As if my time here had never existed at all.
Needing to feel grounded somehow, I went to the bureau, slid open the bottom drawer, and reached under a sweater to pull out my old cigar box, the one I had used to hold my treasures when I was young. I carried it over to the bed and sat, placing it atop the covers in front of me. Though not exactly a secret, I had always kept this container and its contents to myself. I’d added a few things to it since coming here to live, but the box mostly held mementoes of my former life, the one that had been mine for only six years before it was taken away from me for good.
Opening the lid, I sat back against the pillows and looked inside, taking a quick inventory of all the box contained. Though Jake had nothing like this among his possessions—nor did anyone else I knew, for that matter—I felt sure that many an Englisch boy did. It seemed to be the Englisch way of things, to hang on to items for sentimental reasons, as if the things themselves had value.
Inside the box were the treasures of my youth: baseball cards, a tiger’s eye marble, a shark’s tooth, some foreign coins, a piece of petrified wood, a rock with a hole in it, a ticket stub from a ball game, a long-dead mini-flashlight, a small key, and two photographs.
I took out the pictures and studied them. The first was of Brady and me, taken when I was about the age he was now. My dad kept a copy of this same photo prominently displayed in his home, and I liked it so much that Liz had made a copy of it for me too. In the picture, my little brother and I were at the beach with the dancing surf behind us, sitting in the sand, our hair wet from having been in the water. I had my arm around him, and we were both smiling at the camera, brown from the sun.
Gazing at it now made me smile, as it always did.