The Life She Was Given
Ellen Marie Wiseman
For Benjamin and Jessica—
You are my greatest accomplishment
and
I love you beyond words.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Once again, it is with great joy and true amazement that I express my appreciation for the people who helped, supported, and believed in me during the writing of this, my fourth novel. To my readers far and wide, my online supporters and friends, and the people who live in and around my community, thank you for your continued enthusiasm and warm encouragement. Thank you for the cards and letters and e-mails, and for the many invitations to visit and speak at your book clubs, libraries, and meetings. Thank you also to everyone who took time out of their busy schedules, and in some cases drove through winter storms, to attend my events. Seeing your smiling faces and hearing your kind words means more than you know.
To my friends and family, thank you for understanding that writing a novel takes considerable time and effort, for cheering me on, for believing in me every time I lost faith in myself, for celebrating my victories, and for always being there when I needed a break.
To my mentor, William Kowalski, thank you for giving me the tools to make a career out of writing. This book, along with the others, would not exist if it weren’t for your brilliant advice, gentle guidance, and confidence in me. When we were working together a hundred years ago, I never dreamed it would turn into this!
Thank you to my BP author family for keeping me sane. I’m not sure I would have made it this far without you.
A thousand thanks and heaps of love to Debra Battista, Beth Massey, and Barbara Titterington for reading the first three chapters of the manuscript and for reassuring me that I was on the right track. You have no idea what your uplifting words mean to me.
Again my sincere appreciation goes out to my wonderful editor, John Scognamiglio, for your continued faith in me, for your enthusiasm about my work, and for coming up with the title of this book. Thank you also to Kristine Mills for another amazing cover, and to the rest of the Kensington team for your dedication and hard work behind the scenes. You rock!
I will never find adequate words to thank my trusted friend and brilliant agent, Michael Carr, for everything you do for me. From your always-reliable advice about my career to your spot-on feedback on every manuscript, you continue to be everything I could ask for in an agent. To say I appreciate your wisdom, guidance, and friendship would be an understatement.
As always, I can never thank my beloved family enough for always supporting and believing in me. To my parents, my brother and his wife, your unconditional love is the foundation on which I’ve built my life. To my wonderful mother, Sigrid, there are no words to express how much I love, appreciate, and cherish you. Thank you for being my biggest fan, and for helping me believe in myself. The best part of this journey has been making you proud. If I’m half the wife, mother, grandmother, and Oma you are, I will consider my life a success. To my husband, Bill, thank you for riding this roller coaster with me, for being my biggest champion and best friend, and for always, always being there when I need you. I can’t imagine sharing this crazy ride with anyone else.
Last but certainly not least, I want to express my endless love and gratitude to my children, Ben, Jessica, Shanae, and Andrew, and my precious grandchildren, Rylee, Harper, and Lincoln. Thank you for loving and believing in me, and for making me the proudest mother and grandmother on earth. You are my reason for living, and my greatest accomplishment. I love you with everything that I am.
CHAPTER 1
LILLY
July 1931
Blackwood Manor Horse Farm
Dobbin’s Corner, New York
Nine-year-old Lilly Blackwood stood in the attic dormer of Blackwood Manor for what felt like the thousandth time, wishing the window would open so she could smell the outdoors. Tomorrow was her birthday and she couldn’t think of a better present. Sure, Daddy would bring her a new dress and another book when he came home from Pennsylvania, but it had rained earlier and she wanted to know if the outside air felt different than the inside air. She wondered if raindrops made everything feel soft and cool, the way water did when she took a sponge bath. Or did the outside feel warm and sticky, like the air inside her room? She had asked Momma a hundred times to change the window so it would open, and to take the swirly metal off the outside so it would be easier to see out, but as usual, Momma wouldn’t listen. If Momma knew Daddy let her play in another part of the attic when she was at church, Daddy would be in big trouble. Even bigger trouble than for teaching her how to read and for giving her a cat on her third birthday. Lilly sighed, picked up her telescope off the sill, and put it to her eye. At least it was summertime and she didn’t have to scrape ice off the glass.
Daddy called this time of day twilight, and the outside looked painted in only two colors—green and blue. The row of pine trees on the other side of the barn, past the fields where the horses played, looked like the felt Lilly used for doll blankets. Shadows were everywhere, growing darker by the minute.
Lilly skimmed the edge of the woods, looking for the deer she saw yesterday. There was the crooked willow tree. There was the rock next to the bush that turned red in the winter. There was the broken log next to the stone fence. There was the—She stopped and swung the telescope back to the fence. Something looked different on the other side of the woods, near the train tracks that cut through the faraway meadow. She took the telescope away from her eye, blinked, then looked through it again and gasped. Air squeaked in her chest, like it always did when she got excited or upset.
A string of blue, red, yellow, and green lights—like the ones Daddy put above her bed at Christmastime—hung above a giant glowing house made out of something that looked like cloth. More lights surrounded other houses that looked like fat, little ghosts. Lilly couldn’t make out the words, but there were signs too, with letters lit up by colored bulbs. Flags hung from tall poles, and a line of square yellow lights floated above the railroad tracks. It looked like the windows of a stopped train. A really long one.
Lilly put down the telescope, waited for her lungs to stop whistling, then went over to her bookcase and pulled out her favorite picture book. She flipped through the pages until she found what she was looking for—a colorful drawing of a striped tent surrounded by wagons, horses, elephants, and clowns. She hurried back to the window to compare the shape of the tent in the book to the glowing house on the other side of the trees.
She was right.
It was a circus.