Daybreak: The Days of Redemption Series, Book One Read Free Page A

not. If I knew, I would tell you, Peter.” Standing up, her mother shook her head. “I’m getting tired. I no longer care to look in these boxes.” Her voice turning pinched, she continued. “Elsie, please walk with me back to my rooms?”
    Obediently, Elsie moved to stand up, but Peter held her back with a hand on her arm. “ Nee, stay, Elsie. Now that we’ve started digging in here, I’d like to see what else is inside.” Something was propelling him forward. Maybe it was his mother’s unfamiliar hesitancy.
    Perhaps it was his own selfish wants—a part of him enjoyed seeing her discomfort. It gave her a taste of what he’d felt much of his life. With purposeful motions, he pulled out another sampler of a Psalm, the stitching uneven and childlike. A cloth doll. An old packet of flower seeds.
    And then a framed photograph, wrapped in plastic bubble wrap. The Amish didn’t accept photographs, believing that copying their image was a graven sin. “Mamm, what in the world?”
    “Peter, don’t unwrap that.”
    His mother’s voice was like steel, but Peter ignored the command. He was forty-two years old, not fourteen. And now he was curious.
    “Who is this, Mother?” he asked as he pulled the plastic away, finding himself staring at a photograph of a beautiful young woman. Her hair was dark and smooth, her eyes the same coffee-with-cream brown color that looked back at him in the mirror.
    A vague thread of apprehension coursed through him.
    “Who is it?” Elsie asked.
    “It’s a woman, a woman of about your age,” he said patiently, ignoring the tension reverberating from his mother. “She’s mighty pretty, with brown wide-set eyes and hair. Why, she could be your twin, Elsie.”
    Elsie gazed at the photograph, but the three of them knew it was basically for show. Her eyesight had gotten much worse over the last two years. “She is pretty,” she allowed. “Though we all know I already have a twin. I’m glad this girl isn’t one, too. I have no need for one more!”
    “Since she’s an Englischer , she couldn’t be your twin. Ain’t so, Mamm?” He chuckled, raising his eyes to share a smile with his mother. Then stilled.
    His mother looked like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle. Her face was pale, twin splotches of color decorating her cheeks. And her eyes . . .
    They were the exact ones in the photograph.
    Suddenly, he knew. “Mother, this is you, isn’t it? This is you in a cap and gown. At your high school graduation.”
    His mother averted her eyes.
    Elsie gasped. “Mommi? What were you doing, dressed up like an Englischer ?”
    Though his mother said nothing, Peter realized he didn’t need an explanation. The item in his hands was clear enough. Slowly, he got to his feet, his knees creaking with the effort. “Your grandmother wasn’t dressed up as an Englischer, Elsie,” he said quietly. “For some reason, she wasn’t Amish here. She was English.”
    Bitterness coursed through him as he thought of the many, many times she’d belittled all of them because they weren’t perfect enough. Weren’t devout enough. Didn’t obey the Ordnung to the letter.
    The way her criticisms had driven his siblings Jacob and Aden and Sara away.
    The way her perfection had made his other brother, Sam, try too hard, had made his youngest sister, Lorene, feel terrible about herself.
    The way her iron will had even pulled apart his God-given easygoing nature, causing him to do things he shouldn’t.
    And she’d done all of this on top of a heap of lies.
    He thought of all the times she’d even been critical of his sweet wife, Marie. The way she’d criticized meals and housekeeping and sewing.
    Appalled, he stared at his mother. Really looked at her, as if for the very first time. “Talk to me, Mamm. Were you raised English?”
    “Yes.”
    “Were you ever going to tell us the truth?”
    For a few seconds, time seemed to stand still. The dust particles in the air froze. Then