West For Love (A Mail Order Romance Novel) Read Free

own pain would once and for all go
away. But that was no longer the case. Losing William was like bearing a
visible scar. Anyone that looked at Anna saw it, knew it, and treated her differently.
Word spread around Lowemills like wildfire, and it was able to happen so fast
because William wasn’t in town. He couldn’t control it and neither could Anna.
Some people looked at her with shame. Some hung their heads. Some shook their heads
as though they knew everything... and maybe they did. Some nodded at her,
offering consoling eyes or a pat on the back. Those were the worst. Being
touched by strangers.
    No matter what she did or where she
went, she felt watched and judged.
    If she cooked a meal for her
family, to try and help out at home, she worried it wouldn’t be good enough.
And if it wasn’t good enough would her family then compare that to the failed
marriage? And those thoughts plagued Anna all the time. Worrying if there was more
to the divorce than just not being able to conceive a child.
    Was she not a good enough
homemaker?
    Was her cooking bad?
    Sure, William could afford someone
to take care of all that, but it was Anna’s job to do it.
    Most of all, was she an
unsatisfactory lover?
    It made her cry sometimes, out of
nowhere, when she thought about it. She had tried her best to understand what
William wanted and tried even harder to please him. Never once did she deny his
touches or demands for her body. Never once did she do anything but smile and
appreciate when he enjoyed her.
    After crying, Anna quite often
found herself angry. With the anger came her own distance. She would stand on
the porch and stare out to the open world before her. It seemed so large yet so
small. All she had to do was walk, right? Just walk a straight line and leave.
She could be anywhere she wanted... maybe even west, just like William had
mentioned. Anna had heard the chatter about women in and around Lowemills going
west to answer the call to be a bride. Many men had moved that way for farmland
and opportunity. Maybe that’s what Anna needed for herself too.
    Opportunity.
    Anna was setting the dinner table
when her father came in with a large hole in pants. His exposed knee was cut,
red, and looked swollen.
    “Are you okay?” she asked her
father.
    He looked down and shrugged his
shoulders. “What do you mean?”
    “Your pants are ripped,” Anna said.
“And your knee...”
    “They’ve been ripped for days,” her
father said.
    He walked away with a slight limp,
breaking Anna’s heart again. Anna looked up and saw Abigail standing at the
other side of the table.
    “I don’t understand,” Anna said.
    “They haven’t been patched yet,”
Abigail said.
    “Why?”
    Abigail raised her eyebrows. Her
beauty was so radiant it drove Anna wild. No matter how many times Anna looked
in a mirror and tried to pull her blonde hair back tighter or tried to imagine
her blue eyes becoming bluer, it never happened. Abigail was certainly the
prettiest daughter.
    “That’s not fair,” Anna continued.
“Our father shouldn’t be out there with holes in his clothing.”
    “Mother hasn’t fixed them,” Abigail
said. “I don’t know what else to say.”
    Anna understood. What else was
there to say?
    This was a terrible mess and Anna
bore the guilt of it all for the last month since the divorce.
    After a quiet meal that tasted
bland, Anna crept away. Later that night, she found her father’s pants and
fixed them. After patching the pants, she left them where her father would find
them the next morning.
    The very next day her father went
to work outside, wearing the newly fixed pants, but he didn’t say a word about
it. He didn’t thank Anna nor acknowledge it had been done. And the same went
for her mother. No matter how much Anna cooked or cleaned, nothing was ever
said to her. She felt used.
    Then came the night, a week after
fixing her father’s pants, when Anna found Abigail in her room, silently
weeping while hugging a