They'd both be in for a big surprise, I inwardly vowed, despite my uneasy feelings.

Tina, Dad's girlfriend, had talked him into believing that his baby girl would run home after a week or two of living the harsh and restrictive lifestyle of the Amish. Of course, his reasons were less than honorable for sure. It still amazed me that my dad was allowing me to move into the Amish society to be with Noah. My belly tightened at the remembrance of his words. If my ears and eyes weren't deceiving me, I really was in some faraway land.ĭad's voice drifted into my mind, You know, Rose, no one is holding a gun to your head to do this. The murmurings of the strange language behind me didn't help the feeling of displacement I was experiencing, either. When I opened my eyes, Noah was gone, and I suddenly felt very alone in a foreign world. I couldn't live without him, and somehow I had to make my decision to become Amish work-so that the two of us would never be torn apart again. My heart wouldn't have recovered, and that's why I had to be brave right now. I couldn't even imagine a world without him-it would be as if the sun disappeared from the sky.

If I'd lost Noah on that fateful night, a part of me would have died also. A few weeks had passed, but my knees still felt like jelly when I pictured that rainy night on the road and the blur of the giant truck heading straight for Noah and his horse, Rumor. Seeing the brace sent a chill down my back when I remembered the buggy wreck that had nearly killed Noah. The sunshine caught the golden highlights in his hair, making him look like a grungy angel fallen from the clouds-an injured one, that is, with the metal brace that was attached to his leg glinting in the sun. Peeking out the window, I watched Noah limp down the pathway behind his mom.

Belonging by karen ann hopkins