Caroline's Secret (22 page)

“What about little Emma? How do you think they will treat her?” Lorie asked.

Andrew’s heart gave a lurch.

“It’s the best way, Andrew,” Emily added. “No one here knows her secret.”

“You know, and I know.” And his
onkle
and Esther. But none of those people were willing to hold the mistake against Caroline.

“
Jah
, but we all love Caroline.”

“And Emma,” Lorie added. “I don’t care what Caroline did in her past. I only care about now. She’s been a
gut freinden
to me these past couple of years. I don’t want to see her shunned.”

“We all make mistakes,” Emily said quietly.

“You love her, don’t you?” Lorie asked.

He opened his mouth to reply, but Emily interjected, “Don’t you lie, Andrew Fitch. I’ve seen the way you look at her when you think no one’s looking.”

“And everyone has heard about the kiss on Main Street.” A tinge of pink stained Lorie’s cheeks.

“Jah,”
he said. “I love her.”

“Then what are you waiting for?” Lorie asked.

“A sign.” That was all he needed, something to tell him that he should go after her and do everything in his power to bring her back to Wells Landing.

“Andrew Fitch, I thought you were smarter than that,” Emily exclaimed. “Go after her.”

He couldn’t stop his frown of confusion.

Lorie reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out a red, white, and blue envelope. “Consider this your sign,” she said, pushing it across the table to him.

Inside was a round-trip ticket to Tennessee. He looked back to the two women across the table from him.

“We all pitched in,” Emily said.

Lorie tossed him a smile. “Even Jonah.”

“Now go get her back.”

Esther placed the platter of chicken in the center of the table, then slid into her seat opposite Abe.

They bowed their heads and said their prayer.

“Well,” she said, the minute they had given their thanks.

“Well, what?” he asked, spearing a chicken leg with his fork.

“Is he going?”

Abe dropped the chicken onto his plate and shrugged as he reached for the potatoes. “I do not know.”

“Surely he’s said something.”

“Nay”.
He dumped a load of the potatoes onto his plate and reached for the corn on the cob.

“Abe Fitch, is food all you care about?”

“
Nay
, but there’s no sense in starving just so we can talk.”

Esther shook her head, but started filling her own plate. “What is it going to take to get that boy to go?”

“I think he’s worried.”

“About what?” Esther asked.

“Sometimes it’s better to wonder about the answers rather than know them for certain and be hurt by the truth.”

“Would you stop talking in riddles and tell me what you mean?”

He swallowed his bite and wiped his mouth on the napkin. “What I mean is, sometimes the wondering is better than the hurting.”

She thought about that a second. “You’re saying that Andrew is afraid that Caroline will turn him down.”

“Jah.”

She scooted back from the table with such force that she knocked her chair over backward. Moxie let out a large “woof.” The pooch was quickly growing into his bark.

“Where are you going?” Abe asked.

Esther righted her chair and straightened her prayer
kapp
. “I’m going to go kick that boy in the pants.”

“Aren’t you going to finish your
nachtess
?”

She shook her head. “There’ll be time for eating after I get these two together.”

Andrew looked up as Esther barged into the furniture store.

“Sorry, Esther, I was just about to close up. And
Onkle
’s with . . . well, I thought he was with you.”

“Jah,”
Esther said with a curt nod. “He’s at my supper table right now.”

Andrew frowned. “Then why are you here?”

“I’ve come to give you your sign.” She handed him the letter she had received from Caroline that very afternoon. “If you don’t go after her, that girl is going to make the biggest mistake of her life.”

Andrew’s fingers trembled as he took the envelope from Esther. Was this what he truly wanted?

That answer was easy. It was. He loved Caroline with all his heart. Emma too. Their leaving had taken all the sunshine from his world. “But—”

“There is no room for buts. She thinks you don’t want her. Unless you go after her—and soon—all will be lost.”

He shook his head and started to hand the letter back to Esther. “Emma needs her father.”

She refused his offering and instead crossed her arms around her ample girth. “I won’t tell you that Emma doesn’t need a father.
Jah
, that much is true. But Emma needs
a
father. A
gut
Amish
vatter
. Not some smooth-talking
Englischer.
If Caroline marries Trey, then she’ll be shunned by her folks and be forced to live among the
Englisch
. How long do you think such a marriage would last?”

The words were like a punch in the stomach. If Caroline were to become estranged from her English husband, she would not be welcomed back into the Amish church. She would forever be an outcast. “But—”

“Caroline misses you,” Esther interjected. “Go to her and see what God has in store for the both of you.”

Andrew looked down at the letter, then back up into Esther’s serious blue eyes.
Was
this the sign he had been waiting on all along?

“Would you mind repeating that, son?”

Trey stared at the bottom of the empty tumbler, then set the glass on the coffee table in front of him. This phone call was long overdue, but even in the days that he had been putting it off, he still hadn’t come up with the right words to tell his father about Caroline . . . and Emma.

“I have a daughter.” Repeating the words didn’t take away their strangeness on his tongue. He had a daughter.

His father sighed on the other end of the line. “I was afraid this would happen. As soon as I got elected, I knew something like this would crop up.”

He had?

“You’ve got to be careful, son. There are people out there who will take advantage. I never thought I’d be saying this. You need to get an appointment with a doctor. You’ll have to be as discreet as possible. If we can keep this away from the press, all the better. Especially until we can prove the child’s not yours.”

The image of large gray eyes set in the cherub face flashed through his mind’s eye. “She’s mine.”

His father grew so quiet on the other end of the line that Trey thought they had been disconnected.

“Dad?”

“Why are you so sure?”

That was Duke, always pushing the boundaries of what was accepted. “Because she looks just like me.” Trey wanted to shout the words, but he managed to keep his tone even. Yelling wasn’t going to make the situation any better.

“This won’t look good.”

“There’s more.”

“More?”

“She’s Amish.”

His father swore under his breath. “This looks real bad, son.”

Trey shook his head. He had known Duke Rycroft would react this way. His first concern had always been and would always be what the public thought.

And he knew that it would look like he had taken advantage of an innocent.

How did a man explain to the media that he had fallen for Caroline right from the start? The differences in their home lives and the way that they had been raised were nothing compared to the pull he’d felt toward her.

He was pretty sure she felt the same. He hadn’t coerced her into something she hadn’t wanted. Theirs was a pure love, strong and true. Or at least it had been. But the media would turn it inside out and make it something dirty and wrong.

Maybe they should have married, or maybe they should have held off showing their love. But there wasn’t a person out there who hadn’t made a mistake at least once in their life. Not that the press would understand.

Just the thought of Caroline fighting off the media and their endless hounding sent shivers down his spine. She wasn’t prepared for that. But it was coming, like it or not.

“What are you going to do about this?”

Trey sat forward on the couch and braced his elbows on his knees. He wanted to bury his face in his hands, scrub his knuckles over his stinging eyes, but he held on to the receiver. “I’m going to marry her.”

His father grew quiet once again. Trey could almost hear him chewing over the words. “Do you really think that’s the best idea?”

He didn’t know what to think anymore. He had been searching for Caroline, hoping to see her again, get the infatuation he held for her put to rest. One day they had been happily hiding out from their parents not worried about one thing their complicated future would bring, and the next she was gone.

He thought he would find her, see if what they had was as real as it had been all those months ago. But instead he found he had a child, a thought that wiped all else from his brain. He was a father.

“What would you have me do, Dad? Just ignore her?”

“Of course not, but marriage?”

What was he saying? It would be scandal enough when the press found out that he had fathered a child out of wedlock. Then to not marry her? Did his father realize what he was saying?

“Just hear me out,” Duke said. “Maybe if we give her a little more money and—”

“Please tell me you’re joking.” If he wasn’t, then Trey was likely to be sick to his stomach. He and Caroline had created a life. He couldn’t just walk away from Emma and pretend she didn’t exist. “Do you know what her church would do to her if I don’t marry her?”

“I don’t. But she’s not my concern.”

Red flashed behind Trey’s eyes. “I’m going to let you go now, and hopefully I can forget you even said that.”

“You should listen to me, boy. She’s not one of us, and she never will be. Marrying her would be the biggest mistake of your life.”

“That may be. But since I can’t take it back, I’m sure going to make it right.”

With that, he hung up the phone, his father’s sputtering echoing in his ears long into the night.

Caroline’s heart gave a hard pound when she heard the roar of the engine and the crunch of the tires against the gravel road. Trey had arrived.

She brushed her hands over her apron, then ran them over the sides of her hair. Her prayer
kapp
was in place. Emma was dressed in her first ever
schlupp schotzli
and looked cute as a button even if Caroline said so herself. Everything was in place for Trey’s visit.

It was a simple plan really; they were going to have pie with her parents, then Caroline had planned a buggy ride around Ethridge. He hadn’t gotten to spend very much time with Emma. That was something they needed rectify immediately. Though Caroline wasn’t keen on answering too many questions from the good citizens of their community, it was only a matter of time before someone started adding up the time that Caroline had been gone and Emma’s age and came up with the truth.

“I see your
Englisch bu
is here.”

Caroline let out a nervous sigh. “
Jah
. Do you think
Dat
will come out of the barn?”

Grace Hostetler’s mouth pulled down at the corners. “Don’t expect too much from your father, Caroline.” She used a dishcloth to wipe the table down one last time before their company came into the house. “This has been very hard on him.”

“I s’pose.” But not talking to her surely wasn’t helping any.

Caroline knew that the situation couldn’t be easy for him. She had left the community, but he had stayed. He’d had to explain why his daughter, his only child, had suddenly vanished.

She pushed away the thought and went to let Trey inside.

“Trey.” She greeted him with a forced smile. He looked as handsome as always in his fancy
Englisch
clothes, and Caroline wondered again at the waste of it all. Was it necessary to have so much? She shook her head at her own thoughts and motioned for him to enter.

He entered the house as if he were stepping into a pit of snakes. She knew the feeling. She had felt that exact same way as she had stood on his father’s front porch all those many months ago.

Her
elders’ haus
was a far cry from Trey’s sleek black-and-gray apartment with its carpeted floor and artwork on the walls. She wasn’t embarrassed, but she knew it couldn’t compare in his eyes.

“Trey, this is my
mudder
Grace.”

He reached a hand out for her to shake. “It’s a pleasure,” he said, but his voice cracked on the last word.

“Come sit down, Trey, I’ve made us some coffee,” her
mamm
said.

“And we’ve got pie,” Caroline added. “So we can talk.”

He gave a stiff nod and followed them into the kitchen. “Is your father here?”

“Jah,”
Caroline said. “But he’s working in the barn.”

Her mother let out a discreet cough, then indicated some point behind them both.

Caroline turned as her
vatter
entered the room. He held a giggling Emma high in his arms.

It was one thing she could say about her
dat
. He might have trouble forgiving Caroline for her transgressions, but he didn’t hold a single one against this
grossdochder.

Without a word, Grace poured him a cup of coffee and set it in front of his place at the table.

Dat
murmured his thanks, sliding into the chair at the head of the table and setting Emma on her feet.

Everyone took their seats, staring around at the others while no one was ready to make the first move.

Unable to take it any longer, Caroline spoke. “We have a great deal to talk about.”

Trey cleared his throat. “I’ve asked your daughter to marry me. It’s the only solution.”

Caroline shook her head. “It is not.”

“It is.”

“Halt!”
Her father rarely raised his voice, and the fact that he did so now alarmed Caroline.

Trey nervously drummed his fingers on the table but managed to hold his words.

“I’m not sure marriage is the answer,” her mother said quietly.

“There has been a dishonor,” her father protested.

Trey had the good grace to flush at the accusation, but still he said nothing.

“A wedding now would be like shuttin’ the barn door after all the horses have escaped,” her mother added.

“I want to do what’s right,” Trey finally said. “My family will not accept scandal lightly.”

Not words of love, but shame. “Is that all this means to you?” Caroline asked. “Disgrace?”

He took her hand into his own and squeezed her fingers. “Caroline, I love you. I always have.” But she saw him swallow hard as he said the words.

He might have loved her once, but she wasn’t convinced his feelings were true if it took him two years to wonder what happened to her, why she had disappeared, and where she had been.

He just had found more than he had expected.

Men like Trey were used to women falling at their feet. She was a novelty. Intriguing and unique.

And then there was Andrew.

“There is more here at stake than talk of love.” Her mother lifted her coffee cup and took a delicate sip, an action Caroline realized was meant to hide her own misgivings.

“Jah,”
her
dat
said. “There’s the
meidung
.”

Trey looked to her.

“A shunning,” she supplied. Her heart dropped at the thought. If she married Trey, it would be worse than a shunning. There would be no going back.

“And they will shun you if you marry me?”

“Worse,” Caroline managed to whisper. “I would never be able to come here again.”