The Mending Summer

Two years ago, Anna Schrock was jilted three weeks before her wedding.

Her district has been kind to her ever since. Voices drop when she comes round a corner. Nobody asks how she is, and nobody ever asks what it was like. She has become a woman people are careful with, and it is quietly finishing her.

Then an Englisch gallery owner walks down a market aisle and offers a contract no district in that part of Indiana has ever seen. Twelve hand-quilted quilts by the Saturday of Labor Day weekend. Enough money for a new roof on the deacon's house. Enough to pay an old woman's winter before the winter comes.

Anna needs seven pairs of hands, four frames, and a room with light in it.

The only room in the district with four south windows stands in the yard of the family of the man who left her.

His mother offers it anyway. And when Anna opens the door, the frames are already standing there — built, levelled and squared, in a room somebody has scrubbed on his knees. Nobody will say who.

Caleb Bontrager has got to twenty-nine years of age on jah, on nee, and on it'll keep. He has wanted Anna since he was nineteen and has never once thought he had the right to say so. And he knows something about the night she was left that nobody else in the world knows.

He has until September to tell her.

THE MENDING SUMMER is an unhurried, deeply felt Amish love story about work done properly, the kindness that does more harm than unkindness ever could, and the difference between a thing that has been mended and a thing that has only been covered.

For readers who like their Amish fiction slow, warm and honest — and who know that the back of a quilt is where the work is.

Free in Kindle Unlimited.