Wildwood Magic
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Synopsis
A woman escapes her abusive husband and finds shelter in a magical orchard in this spellbinding novel of magic and self-discovery from the author of Wildwood Whispers.
Here be witches and wayward girls…
In a town nestled in the Appalachian Mountains, Rachel Smith has found a new life tending a lush apple orchard. She’s safe within its grove. If her dreams are haunted by memories of her violent husband, that pain is soothed by fresh mountain air and apples that taste as sweet as honey.
But Rachel wasn’t meant to live in the shadows. The orchard drew her to Morgan’s Gap to fulfill a purpose and a tight-knit community of wisewomen who honor the old mountain traditions are ready to teach her. A world of magic awaits Rachel, one filled with new friendships and possibly new love.
Yet Rachel’s past is creeping in. A preacher with a familiar face has stormed into town, and his dangerous sermons may damn Rachel—and the people she’s come to love—to the flames.
Release date: July 25, 2023
Publisher: Orbit
Print pages: 384
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Wildwood Magic
Willa Reece
Morgan’s Gap, Virginia, 1959
A breeze showed me the way.
I slipped from the hot, frenzied crowd in the revival tent, going under and out a loose flap in the heavy canvas like a much younger child. The wind rustled the musty fabric, even though I hadn’t felt it on my own flushed skin. Sister Fay and the other matrons’ attention was focused on the cheap portable podium at the front of the crowd. They were all red too—from the closeness and the summer heat and the fervor of the other revival attendees.
And Brother Tate.
As the preacher yelled about the fire that would consume nonbelievers, I was suddenly sure that the hellfire he wanted them to fear was actually here, already inside them, burning all the people around me from the inside out.
I’d seen this fire before in Sister Fay’s eyes whenever I “strayed from the path.” As far as I could tell—and I’d had all of my thirteen years to figure it out—you strayed when you asked questions or when you were too slow, too quick, too anything but obedient with your eyes cast down and your shoulders bowed to take up less space.
Invisible.
It had gotten harder and harder to hide in plain sight as my body resisted my attempts to stay small. I could—most of the time—control my voice and my eyes, but I couldn’t help what was becoming a lean, gawky figure with hands, feet and shoulders too big to be unnoticed.
And breasts.
Soft fullness that only stood out more because the rest of me was so bony.
Growing.
The white patent-leather Mary Janes Sister Fay had forced onto my feet that morning pinched my toes and made me walk in tiny mincing steps both unnatural and highly ineffective for getting very far very fast. Since Sister Fay was always telling me to slow down, it would have been pointless and probably painful to complain. Much more painful than pinched toes or the blisters I would surely have come morning.
Morning was my goal.
Tonight, when I’d followed the crowd into the tent to find creaky folding chairs for all the smaller children in the back, I’d felt exposed when Brother Tate had singled me out. He’d commented on what a good girl I was to help the sisters shepherd the little ones into place. But I hadn’t felt good. The praise had made the hair rise up on the back of my neck and the palms of my hands go wet in a scared, cold sweat that wouldn’t wipe away on my skirts no matter how hard I tried.
No wonder the sudden fluttering movement of loose canvas caught my attention. Here, it seemed to say. Look. Here. A way out. I dropped down to my knees and left the pounding fist of the preacher and the brimstone he shouted about behind. I didn’t even dust off the faded cotton of my Sunday dress when I got back to my feet on the other side.
I just started walking.
Away from the repurposed circus tent. Away from the strange fire in people’s eyes.
There was nowhere for me to go. I’d been left at the girls’ home as a baby with no hint of my heritage save for the “mark of her mother’s sins” on my left shoulder. Sister Fay often used a green birch on the pale strawberry birthmark as if to flay it away. But the pink patch of skin was always there when the switch marks healed.
Since I had no where to go, I aimed for a when. Morning. With my toes pinched and no flashlight, it was a mountainous goal for a girl who couldn’t even manage to be seen and not heard, but the sunrise called to me from somewhere down the long stretch of country road that disappeared out of sight on the horizon. It seemed right to take one step after another away from the tent and in the opposite direction of the Home for Wayward Girls.
I wasn’t running away. All I’d ever known was the home and the Sect women who ran it. The sisters who fed, clothed and never once spared us the rod were harsh but familiar. It was the growing that frightened me, and the Sect men who noticed it.
Around the cleared fairgrounds, where the circus tent squatted with no calliope music or balloons or fried funnel cakes, was a wilderness of trees. That’s where the breeze came from, fresh and oh-so-appealing on my face and arms. There wouldn’t be any monkeys there or brightly colored tropical birds, but I liked it anyway, so different and peaceful compared to the city and the circus tent.
But it was also dark and shadowy, a jungle waiting for me to explore.
Like something out of the books I had to sneak around to read.
So I would walk until morning, and no matter what happened after that, every step I took on my own surrounded by the whispering woods was a step no one could ever take away. Not Brother Tate nor all his followers put together.
The Mary Janes were in my hand by the time I began to see the tops of smaller trees against a lightening sky. Hours before, when the cars from the revival had begun to drive past me in a steady stream of headlights, I dodged onto a side road and continued to walk. Eventually I decided to take the shoes off to relieve my toes and ease the busted blisters on my heels. I didn’t throw the shoes into the shadows where the forest began and the dirt track stopped. Even then, with the tent behind me and all those steps between me and the sisters, I shuddered at the punishment I would surely face if they found me without the shoes.
They weren’t mine. They were used for a time and then passed on to the next girl and the next. I gripped them tightly in my fist and walked on, taking more steps against the even tighter hopelessness of those never-ending “next girls” who would also own nothing. Not the clothes on their backs nor the skin beneath them either. Not even the thoughts in their heads were supposed to be theirs.
Mine always were, though. Deep down. Where no one could see. I had thoughts that were all my own. I thought about pearls and presidents, about Betty and Veronica. I thought about miniskirts and marches. About forbidden newspapers and Nancy Drew. All bits and pieces of news, books, comics and magazines I’d managed to sneak beneath the sisters’ watchful eyes.
When a pink glow softened the sky and revealed the hush of dawn mist around me, morning became too obvious to ignore. A terrible weight settled heavy on my shoulders as the gently warming dew on ground and grass began to rise. I was exhausted. Tired from my long, lonely journey through the night, but also tired from other things.
The switch.
My unstoppable growth.
Brother Tate’s bloodshot eyes.
My feet slowed to a standstill. The dirt road continued around the next curve, but down below the worn track, the forest opened up into an orchard. In the soft, rosy light, the branches were bowed, heavy with the growth of thousands of pale green globes—apples, standing out lighter and brighter than the leaves around them.
My stomach clenched and growled. I clutched it with my free hand and limped off the road toward the trees. There was no hellfire here. No need for invisibility. There was only the cool moisture rising up from the ground through the trees, kissing my cheeks and the ripening apples.
It was a simple, hushed welcome I hadn’t felt in the tent or in all the years prior. I was close kin to the birds beginning to wake and the insects scrambling up, up, up stalks and trunks to warm their wings and antennae in the sun.
I walked through the meandering rows, around and around, as if drawn forward by a tugged string that was anchored deep in my chest. The cold moisture on the ground soothed and numbed my feet. The wet grass was a sweet relief. As was the cover soon provided by the larger, older trees in the middle of the orchard. From sapling to sprawling grandfather I walked until I came to a small rise in what must have been the dead center of the former field.
Maybe the center of the whole wilderness on top of Sugarloaf Mountain.
There the largest apple tree of all grew in an impressive display of gnarled limbs stretching up toward the sky from a trunk that made me think of the elephants I’d seen in a picture book once, left near a garbage pail on the street because of its torn pages. Trash to someone else, but a treasure to me. In spite of its size and the rough, wrinkled bark that proclaimed its great age, the tree on the rise was loaded with more apples than all the trees around it.
The tug on the string in my chest eased.
Once I reached the shelter of its canopy, I stopped and looked up, my attention called to thousands of shadowy crevices and hollows, a leafy universe of fairy nooks and butterfly bowers. I wanted to leap for the lowest branch and pull myself up into the fruit-heavy tree.
My stomach gurgled again, tempted by the abundance within reach.
Thou shalt not steal.
There were some things the matrons got wrong. I was sure of it. But my inner voice said that not stealing was one of the few they got right. So instead of grabbing a green apple and sinking my teeth into its tart goodness, I dropped to the ground at the base of the tree. Hot tears mixed with the cool dew on my cheeks as I gave in to sleep.
The young girl slept while the world around her woke up.
A flock of barn swallows darted from their colony under the metal eaves of an all-but-deserted shed to swoop acrobatically over a nearby meadow. Bees that had waited for the rising sun to dry the dew and the misty air hummed about their summer business, finding wildflowers on the ground now that the apple blossoms were gone. Far in the distance, a rooster crowed and a cow lowed for the maid who would milk it, then open the gate so it could roam the pasture until evening.
Thud. An apple fell.
Thud. Thud.
Then another and another.
The last rolled across the grass to stop against the sleeping girl’s hip. A passerby might have looked up into the old tree to see if a squirrel had dislodged the fruit, for it was far too soon for so many unripened apples to fall.
But no one passed and the girl slept on, sheltered by the First Tree, the greatest tree, on the rise.
Siobhán
Northern Ireland, 1879
Siobhán Wright sewed the precious apple seeds into the lining of her petticoat. She placed the blind-hem stitches snugly together—whip, whip, whip—with light thread that disappeared against the coarsely woven linen. The same way her mother had shown her to secretly stash the coins and Grandmother’s hammered copper ring, which her grandfather had worked into the shape of a tree with twining, twisting roots that mirrored its branches. No one paid any mind to a girl’s patched undergarments.
Even when they were doing their best to get into them.
She had never met her grandparents. The Great Hunger had taken both of them in Black ’47 before she was born. Gone too soon. So many had died younger than they should have during the hard times. Even a woodsman like her grandfather and a wisewoman like her grandmother hadn’t been able to survive when the potatoes failed.
Permanently gnawing insides had driven many of their folk to set off in search of a better life in those days.
“You’re young. Go. Survive,” her mother had said when the famine came again.
Along with the seeds, coins and ring, Siobhán brought a small muslin bundle of dirt from her mother’s herb garden, untainted and blessed. Her father had fashioned her a walnut chest. On it, he carved flocks of barn swallows. Fly… fly… fly away. First to Liverpool. She used the chest for the precious soil no one would want to steal and a few items of clothing. Some might have seen her inheritance as pitiful, but Siobhán knew better. Her family had given all they had left in the world for her journey to a new one.
She wouldn’t let their sacrifice be in vain.
Rachel
Morgan’s Gap, 1959
The scent of baked apples teased me awake. Was that why I had dreamed about apple seeds? But it was the soft mattress ticking and the fresh downy pillow that caused me to sit up. My usual bed was a cot with only a thin rag mat to cover its springs. My only pillow was my own arms. To wake in an unfamiliar place made me instantly suspect that I was still wrapped in the dream that had seemed so real.
But it hadn’t been a good dream, had it? My heart still thumped behind my ribs with the fear I’d felt alongside the girl from another time who’d sewn with the worn, calloused fingers of a much older person. She’d had a mother, but she’d been forced to leave her. I’d had a mother who had left me. Somehow the pain met and mixed and blended together.
I blinked. I rubbed sticky dried tears from the corners of my eyes. Dream world or not, I didn’t want anyone to see that I’d cried. I noticed the shelves once my eyes cleared. The walls of the tiny bedroom were lined with horizontal boards, some bowed under the weight of the books, magazines and papers packed onto them.
Was I awake?
So often I had longed for more books in the barren places I knew, filled only with work and prayer.
“You need rest, but you need food more and I’m too old to carry you a tray. Come in the kitchen and eat.”
I didn’t startle when a woman spoke from the doorway. I had lots of practice hiding my natural reaction to things. But I didn’t hesitate. The woman had already turned to walk away. I jumped up from the bed that wasn’t a dream, noticing my sun-bleached homespun nightgown and the hewn log walls that showed around the edges of the shelves. I reached to run my fingers across the spines of the books. All real. There were wool stockings on my feet and a moist tingling around my toes and a slight numbness in my blistered heels. Someone had brought me in from the orchard. Someone had nursed me. The woman who led me into the kitchen couldn’t have carried me. She was tiny and stooped, and when I got a better look at her face, I gasped because it was craggy and lined, as if she’d been baking pies for a thousand years.
None of the sisters at the Home for Wayward Girls were old. They were only worn. Faded around the edges like the tossed-aside newspapers they used to fill the cracks in the boards of the house in Richmond when the wind blew and there wasn’t much coal.
I gaped at this ancient lady, forgetting my confusion, my hunger. The woman’s long skirt was actually a pair of wide-legged trousers made of tartan wool in spite of the season. Her pants ended at her ankles, where dainty laced boots began. On top she wore a man’s shirt with rolled sleeves where her arms poked out, freckled and sun browned. Her arms were corded like a man’s, lean and tough, belying her age. Maybe she truly had carried me in from the orchard. But her wild mane of hair told the truth of her years. It was silver like moonlight all around her face and shoulders and down past her waist. Not braided or combed or twisted into shape or pinned or sprayed or tamed by curlers.
Her hair was free.
I quickly reached for my braids to find them as real and as painful at my temples as they’d ever been. The tight braids proved it. I was no longer dreaming.
The tempting scent of apple pie—cinnamon, brown sugar, baking crust and bubbling juice—distracted me from the mystery of how I came to wake in the house. My stomach had growled at dawn. Now it silently ached without the gumption to even gurgle, and my head felt light. Many times I’d been sent to bed without supper, but I’d never walked so long and so far on an empty stomach.
“Sit down before you fall down, girl,” the old woman advised. She nodded her head curtly at a thick spindled chair, and I was glad it was already pulled out from the butcher-block table.
I sat with a plop that would have been punished back at the home.
But the woman only brought me a wedge of pie she must have cut to cool moments before. Buttery, flaky crust. Tender, spice-flecked chunks of apple only sweet enough to soften the bite of the tart fruit. The piece of pie was more than generous. A portion all of a quarter of the entire pastry.
I ate it all. Every bite. Every crumb. And then I stared forlornly at the thick juice left on the solid pottery plate. There wasn’t a switch in sight, but I couldn’t risk sopping up the juice with a finger. As if she sensed that I was still hungry, the old woman turned from the old ice box in the corner with a small pitcher of frothy milk and a muslin-wrapped hunk of cheese.
“This too. You need nourishment. More than I’ll have time to give you. Can’t be helped. We can only stir what we can,” the old woman said.
I drank the mug of milk she poured me and ate the strong, cream-colored cheese. Both were rich and pungent. From a goat instead of a cow. Neither seemed to make it to my stomach. Like the pie, they soaked into my body on the way down. I felt better but not full, as if I was only getting started.
“Name’s Mary. Remember it. Mary May. You’ll need to know one day. And don’t forget the orchard called you. Ain’t no child going to walk that far in the wee hours for nothing. Might seem it was for nothing, mind you. But don’t give up. You’ve got a longer walk ahead. A long hard walk. And there’s no shortcut. One foot in front of the other. That’s all. She got here, didn’t she? She knows how it’s done!” The last was said to a goat that appeared at the screened door that opened out onto a stoop. It was a large billy with a gray beard down to its knobby knees, and it replied to Mary May as if participating in a conversation I could only half understand.
“I was walking away from the revival tent. Didn’t have a place to be,” I said.
The woman refilled my glass, and even though it was greedy I drank all of it down, only stopping between gulps to catch my breath.
“Away is a place, girl. The best place. And this particular mountain orchard is about as away as a body can get,” Mary May said. “Roots twining down to the heart of the earth. Branches stretching up to the sky. Blossoms then fruits like they was plucked from the heavens.”
I could feel the distance I’d traveled somewhere deeper than blistered skin. The air was different around me and the ground was sturdier beneath my feet. As if I’d been off balance before I got here. One step away from falling. But now, I was on solid footing. If this was away, I liked it.
“I’ve never seen so many apples in one place. You’re going to have a good harvest,” I said.
“So many apples right there for the picking, but you didn’t, did you? Didn’t take a one though you’re a starving thing, gone all to growth, and nothing to fuel it by.”
“It didn’t seem right to take without asking. There was no one around.”
“The trees will remember your courtesy. They always do,” the old woman muttered. She nodded with every word she spoke as if she was carrying on a conversation with herself. “I reckon that was a little harder to resist,” she continued. Her nod became specific, indicating something beside my plate, and I was startled by the tiny book I must have picked up from a shelf in the bedroom or hall as I passed. I was too used to grabbing reading materials wherever and whenever I could. The shelves hadn’t stopped in the bedroom. The whole house was lined with them, and every one was full.
My cheeks heated. I picked up the book and held it out to Mary May. She didn’t take it. Instead, she reached to push it back toward me.
“More than your belly is hungry. Any fool can see that. You keep it. Things that catch us like that are never happenstance. It’s always best to listen when the world whispers. When the wildwood whispers. It’s yours,” Mary said. Her tone was scolding, but her eyes were bright. “It’ll take more than goat’s milk to fuel you for the journey ahead.”
I looked down at the gift. It was no larger than the palm of my hand. The golden title glinted as I turned it to the light. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Mary left the room while I read the first few pages. I hated to put it down when she came back with my petticoats in her hands.
“Aired these out on the line. Spot-cleaned your dress. No sense in catching trouble for moss stains,” Mary said. She flipped the petticoats this way and that. “Senseless things. Hiding legs as if we don’t all have them. We can make it useful with a few stitches, though, can’t we?”
Mary sat at the table. I hadn’t noticed the sewing basket she’d crooked over her arm under the petticoat. She placed it on the table in front of her and prepared a needle and white thread quickly with surprisingly nimble fingers. Then she folded the material of the petticoat until she’d fashioned a hidden sleeve on one side near the waist.
“Pockets are power. Up to you what you put in them, see? Only you decide. And no one needs to know,” Mary said. She reached for the book and placed it in the pocket she’d made just big enough to hold it. “And this too. A needle box. My mother made it a long time ago from a fallen branch of that apple tree you were sleeping under. There’s several needles and some thread in there. For you.”
She handed me the applewood needle box. It was a plain and smooth cylinder with no decoration except for the whorls of the aged wood. The bark had been removed and the wood polished by time and fingers. One side had been whittled down to fit into the other. I gently popped it open. The inside had been hollowed out to hold the needles. A small bit of red thread was wound around their silvery eyes.
There had been something in my dream about petticoats and hidden seeds. In all the time I’d been trying to read when the sisters forbade it, I hadn’t thought of using the hated undergarments as a treasure trove.
I closed the needle box and slid it into the hidden pocket beside the book. Two gifts from a stranger who, although strange, seemed like someone I’d known for longer than a half an hour.
As Mary finished stitching, I carried the empty plate and glass to the sink. I tried not to stare, but the room was unusual beyond the quantity of books and papers stacked and piled on every surface. There were herbs bundled with twine and hung to dry in a sun-facing window—mint, dill and others I didn’t recognize. Open shelves lined the tops of the walls, and from them green glass jars sparkled in the morning sunlight, their unlabeled contents made mysterious by the gleam. I thought I could see apple slices through a juicy haze and the thick, chunky texture of persimmon jam. From the exposed beams in the ceiling hung the dark flash of fire-scorched copper pots in various sizes and shapes from stewpot to footed cauldron. And, although there was a great old cast-iron stove, there was also a fireplace in the corner fitted up with a spit and other handles and holders the old woman must have used often, because they were worn smooth.
The stones of the hearth were blackened by soot all the way out to my toes. More blackened than years of an open flame would have accounted for. One corner stone had faint chiseled letters I could barely make out—“HONEYWICK”—and a date that was even more faded. In fact, it looked almost as if someone had scraped the date away so long ago that the scrapes themselves were half-hidden by soot.
“Honeywick,” I deciphered out loud.
Mary hmmmed behind me, but I couldn’t tell if her noise was meant to be a yes or a no, or if it was merely a startled sound, as if my reading of the stone had disturbed her somehow. Whatever the case, I was discouraged from asking about the name or the mysterious date.
I turned politely away from the hearth toward an embroidery stand pushed to the side. It was also dark, as if many years of soot and smoke had colored the wood. And it was empty. Maybe that’s why my fingers were immediately drawn to the carved edges of the hoop, or maybe it was a trick of the morning light that made the carefully crafted leaves seem to move.
There were apples among the leaves. Peeking out just as the green apples had peeked at me at dawn. One of the apples had been made to appear as if someone had taken a bite out of it. Love of the orchard shone through in every carefully placed etch of a long-ago blade.
Suddenly the hoop being empty made my chest tighten and my fingers twitch as if I’d touched a frayed cord with its innards showing. The phantom electricity startled me and I curled my hand against it, but I couldn’t stay chastised for long.
There were many utensils hanging on hooks and nails around the fireplace, but one drew my attention more than the others. It wasn’t my place to reach for the large wooden spoon and take it from the wall. I did it without thinking, driven by the need to look closer at the carving that wound around the handle.
It was a thin, graceful curve of a snake, a harmless one by the rounded shape of its head—garter or green. I was instantly charmed by the tilt of its eyes and the frozen flick of its tongue.
The carving of the serpent on the spoon hanging near the hoop was whimsical—a garden and a snake, but not a warning. A dare. The delicate snake was a rebel, not a devil. Me too, my heart whispered. Me too.
“Best put her back for now. There isn’t time for all that. She’s been hanging there for fifty years; another ten won’t matter,” Mary said.
I didn’t want to hang the spoon back on the wall, but I did. I couldn’t help it if my fingers traced the coils of the little snake or if I hesitated near the stand, afraid to touch it again, but longing to all the same. The strange tightness gripped my chest again. I rubbed my palm against the center of my ribs to try to loosen it, but it wouldn’t ease.
Only the sound of a car’s engine and tires on gravel finally made me turn toward the door. Mary sighed loudly, the billy goat cried out and ran away and a sheriff’s deputy got out of a black-and-white painted Impala. The tightness was explained: The real world had come for me in this fairy-tale cottage I’d found. It had pulled into the front yard and even without flashing lights or sirens I was caught in its terrible clutches.
I’d tried to be careful, but someone must have seen me walking this way.
Mary May put her hands on her hips. She suddenly looked very small in comparison to the burly man whose knuckles made a terrible rat-a-tat-tat-tat on the frame of her screen door. He could see us in the kitchen. He frowned, as if runaway girl-children and wizened old women were nothing but trouble.
“You must be the girl who wandered off last night. They’re breaking down the tent. Need to get you back to the folks you belong to,” the deputy said. He pushed the door open and held it wide without coming inside or saying good morning to Mary May.
“Don’t belong to nobody but herself,” Mary May said, followed by a humph as if there was no use in arguing. “At least let the girl put her shoes on.”
I was already buckling the Mary Janes, thankful for the treatment that made my heels numb so I could walk gingerly toward the man who still hadn’t acknowledged the woman who scolded him.
“I got lost,” I said, but he ignored that too. He put his hand on my back and pushed me toward the squad car so that I had to take several quick steps that made the blisters on my feet sting.
“Found, more like,” Mary May said.
I looked over my shoulder and our eyes locked. She might be smaller than the deputy, and unable to keep him from taking me back to the Sect sisters, but the firm set to her jaw and the look on her face said that she wasn’t as helpless as he and the world might think.
Her look gave me courage. My chest swelled against the tightness and I could suddenly breathe in a last gulp of baked-apple air.
“Hurry up. Get in.” The deputy reached to push me forward again, but this time I was already moving and his fingers brushed harmlessly away. I opened the car door myself and climbed into the backseat.
My last view of Honeywick was through the back glass of the deputy’s car. Like the hearth, the cottage was built entirely of blackened stone. But the cottage’s rock walls were softened by an abundance of flowering vines that twined from foundation to roof and completely covered a small-towered turret on one side. Even all stained by soot or age or whatever had darkened its stones, the cottage, like the carved embroidery hoop and the snake spoon, looked like a fairy tale, one I was being taken away from too soon.
I turned around to face the road, but not before I had imagined myself turning down one corner of a storybook to mark the page.
Rachel
Richmond, Virginia, February 1965
My secret was so much a part of me it was hard to imagine, small and mysterious, and yet, as known as the beating of my heart. My very soul had split, and somewhere deep inside there was another, hidden away… for now.
And there was my problem. That tiny part of my soul was destined to become his… under his fist, under his heel, under his control.
The idea was a horror. I couldn’t remember standing up from the doctor’s desk. I couldn’t remember the nurse’s congratulations or taking my coat from the tree in the reception room. I must have buttoned the perfectly tailored herringbone tweed, automatically. I must have nodded and smiled. I had become so good at nodding and smiling.
Somehow, I maneuvered the sleek Oldsmobile station wagon home. Like the coat, the car had been his choice, one his followers would admire and envy. He chose everything for the same reason, including the new brick rancher in a neighborhood named after the church at its center.
His church. His home. His car. His wife.
He’d chosen me.
I’d been trying to come to grips with that realization for a long time.
Someone like Ezekiel wanted meek and mild. I’d been neat and clean and obedient by the time we’d met. What spirit I’d naturally had a
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