Susie smiled, then hung up. She looked forward to their coming reunion as she rushed around to finish cleaning out the horse and pony stalls, and then the goat pen. She wished with all of her heart that Mamma were returning with Britta, but she couldn’t wait to see her sister.

At that moment, she recalled Ella Mae’s remark about why her mother might have chosen to stay in Missouri—“If ya don’t know just yet, it’ll come to ya when it’s s’posed to,” Ella Mae had said during the visit in her cozy kitchen.

“What on earth did she mean?” Susie was still baffled.

As she worked in the stable, she brushed Ella Mae’s comment aside. When she was very young, she’d sometimes helped Eli with this particular smelly chore, his daily task. Yet never once had he grumbled about it, always displaying a cheerful attitude. So much like Dat, she thought, wondering how Eli would feel about Mamma now living in Missouri. “One thing’s sure, he wouldn’t have resented Allen for it,” she murmured as she swept the cement floor.

So why do I? She felt helpless to surrender caring for Mamma to anyone, even Allen.

Britta dozed off and on during the latter part of the seemingly endless journey toward home, but when she was awake, she relived the strange yet informative conversation with Mamma. Mamma had told her the day after Thanksgiving that she would leave it up to Britta if she wanted to share her story with Susie or anyone else. “It’s yours to tell . . . or not.” The way she’d said it made Britta believe that Mamma would not be returning home for a very long time.

Britta had decided she wanted to tell close family, and she asked Mamma to tell Allen and Sarah, as well as write to Henry and Polly about it. “Everyone else should know, too,” Britta told Mamma.

Mamma had agreed but suggested she talk to Susie herself. “Since you’re such close sisters.”

“I’ll think about when that should be,” Britta had replied, feeling heavy at the thought of doing so.

Mamma had also confided that, through the years, she had talked to Ella Mae Zook about Kathleen. So Ella Mae already knew.

Yet the Wise Woman has never held it against me. It was this fear that nagged at Britta as she rode toward home—that she might bear the blame in some way for the accident that had eventually linked her to her adoptive Amish family. If she let herself ponder it all too much, it made her terribly uneasy. Did Kathleen give me up as a kind of substitute for Eli? A sort of guilt offering for her crime?