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could walk and be there before the midday meal. Clara pivoted to scamper up the porch stairs and then to her second-story bedroom as she considered whether she ought to pack the overnight bag. When she heard movement downstairs, she expected Rhoda had returned from her errand to send the children off on their walk to school. Instead, the heavier footsteps ascending the stairs were her father’s. Clara stepped into the hall.
    “Hello, Daed . Rhoda asked me to tell you she will have a coffee cake ready by midmorning.”
    “I hope she does not go to a lot of trouble. I’m not feeling well.”
    Clara looked at him more closely. When his head drooped at the breakfast table, she had supposed he hadn’t slept well. Now she could see he was pale and his breath labored.
    “You should lie down,” she said.
    “That is my intention,” Hiram said, “but I must ask a favor of you.”
    “Of course.”
    “Take the buggy and go over to John Stutzman’s farm. I promised I would go to help him with roofing repairs today. He will understand that I am ill, but I don’t want him to think I have forgotten him.”
    Clara glanced into her bedroom at the bag on the bed. “Of course.”
    The Stutzmans lived on one of the most outlying of the Amish farms. They were near the Maryland border, but well west of the Kuhn land. A round-trip journey, with time for polite socializing or the meal John’s wife was likely to offer, would take half the day. Clara was grateful, though, that Hiram had enough sense not to go up on a roof when he felt unsteady.
    Fannie would have to understand.

    Fannie tucked the lightweight quilt around her daughter’s shoulders and cracked the window to coax in cool air. Sadie bounced through her days with enough energy for three children. When bedtime came, she dropped into bed and often was asleep before Fannie finished murmuring soft prayers for her household. Tonight was no different.
    Fannie sat on her daughter’s bed and put out the lamp before listening for Sadie’s even breath. She had hoped that Clara would come before the day’s light petered out. Even without conversation, Clara’s presence would have been a comfort.
    Clara feared childbirth as deeply as Fannie longed for it. They knew each other’s secrets more than anyone else. But this—who would have expected this? After five children, the youngest of them twelve years old? At Martha’s age?
    Elam sat in the front room studying papers about crop rotations. He knew Fannie’s news now. But did he know Martha’s?

Clara lost the entire day. By the time she got home from the Stutzman farm, she’d missed the afternoon run of the milk wagon, her usual prospect for hitching a ride to a farm near Fannie’s. Though she might still walk the six miles before darkness fell, she hesitated to leave without being sure her father was on the mend—or at least resting well—and Hannah was so full of after-school chatter that there was no place for Clara to break in and explain she was leaving. Clara recognized the precise moment she looked out the window and knew it was too late.
    She barely slept.
    On Friday morning, Clara paced before daylight the mile to the corner where she knew the milk wagon would pass. The words in Fannie’s notes replayed in her mind. Though a stone dropped in her stomach when she realized the driver was Yonnie Yoder and not one of the two other—more pleasant—dairy drivers, Clara put a smile on her face and asked for a ride that went past the Maple Glen Meetinghouse the Marylanders used. At least she knew he would not require conversation beyond an initial greeting and departing pleasantries.
    When he let her off, Clara ignored Yonnie’s silent scowl and thanked him for obliging her with a ride. He no more approved of her visits to her Marylander relatives than he did his employer’s choice to do business with the Marylanders.
    None of that was Clara’s concern. She only needed to see Fannie. When she knocked on the back