O C T O B E R

After three months with the Fishers, I sometimes found it hard to believe that not so long ago, I thought a crimper had something to do with curling one’s hair, and that being shocked referred to a person, rather than a bundle of wheat. Preparations for Katie’s trial fell, unfortunately, in the middle of harvesting season, and any hopes I harbored about getting support from her family in the creation of our insanity defense were quickly put to rest. In Aaron Fisher’s mind, getting the tobacco in on time and the silos filled were the household priorities.

And like it or not, I was part of that household.

I walked along behind Katie in the rich tobacco field, three acres so lush that they might have been a rice paddy. “This one,” she said, instructing me on which leaves were ready to pick.

“They all look the same to me,” I complained. “They’re all green. Aren’t you supposed to wait until things start to go brown before you pick them?”

“Not tobacco. Look at the size, here.” She snapped a leaf off and set it gently in a basket.

“Think of all the lung cancer, right here in this field,” I murmured.

But it didn’t bother Katie. “It’s a cash crop,” she said simply. “With dairy farming, it’s hard to turn a profit.”

I bent down, ready to snap off my first leaf. “No!” Katie cried. “That’s too small.” She held up another, larger leaf.

“Maybe I should just jump ahead to the next step. Stuffing it into pipes, or sticking the surgeon general’s warning on the box.”

Katie rolled her eyes. “The next step is to hang it, and if you can’t figure out the picking, I’m not going to let you get close to a five-foot-long sharpened stick.”

I laughed and bent to the plants again. As much as I hated to admit it, I was in better shape than I’d ever been in my life. My work as an attorney had always exercised my mind, but not my body; by default, living with the Fishers, I was stretching the limits of both. The Amish believed that hard physical labor was a basic tenet of living, and almost never employed outsiders as farmhands because they couldn’t live up to the standard workday. Although Aaron had never said as much to me, I knew he was expecting me to break down in a citified, sobbing puddle, or sneak from the fields for a glass of lemonade before harvest was finished-things that would point to the obvious fact I wasn’t one of them. All of which made me even more determined to do my share, if only to prove him wrong. To that end, I’d spent a week in early August standing bundles of wheat on end as the cutter spit them out, until my back was knotted and my skin was covered with chaff. I’d matched the rest of the family in that field, minute for minute. In my mind was the thought that if I earned Aaron’s respect on familiar, fertile ground, I might earn his respect on my own turf.

“Ellie, are you coming or not?”

Katie stood with her hands on her hips, her full basket planted between her feet. I’d been picking leaves as my mind wandered too, because my own basket was nearly filled. God only knew if the tobacco I’d chosen was ready for harvest-I took some of the bigger leaves and stuck them on top, so Katie wouldn’t notice. Then I followed her to the long shed that had been empty the few months I’d been living on the farm.

There were large gaps in the slatted walls of the shed, so that the air traveled through in a light breeze. I sat down on a hay bale beside Katie and watched her pick up a skewer as tall as she was. “You poke the leaves through the stem,” she instructed. “Like cranberries on string, for your Christmas trees.”

Now, this I could do. Balancing my own stick against the hay bale, I began to line the leaves up a few inches apart, so that they’d be able to dry. I knew that by the time we were finished, the small field of tobacco would be bare, all the leaves hanging on poles stacked to the rafters of this shed. In the winter, when I was long gone, the family would strip the tobacco and sell it down South.

Would Katie be here to help?

“Maybe when we’re done with this, we could talk about the trial.”

“Why?” Katie said, her attention focused on piercing the stems of her leaves. “You’re going to say what you want to, anyway.”

I let the comment roll off my back. In the months since Katie had been interviewed by the forensic psychiatrists, I had marched along with my insanity defense, although I knew it upset her. In her mind, she hadn’t killed that baby, so an inability to recall the murder had nothing to do with insanity. Every time I asked her for her assistance-with lines of questioning, with the sequence of events of that horrible night-she turned away. Her skittishness about the defense had turned her into a wild card, which made me even more grateful I hadn’t decided to go with reasonable doubt. For an insanity defense, Katie would never have to take the stand.

“Katie,” I said patiently. “I’ve been in a lot more courts than you have. You’re going to have to believe me.”

She stabbed a leaf onto the end of the stick. “You don’t believe me.”

But how could I? Her story, since the beginning of this farce, had changed several times. Either I could make the jury think that was due to dissociation, or they would simply assume she’d been lying. Intentionally, I speared a leaf through the midpoint, instead of the stem. “No,” Katie said, reaching for it. “You’re doing it wrong. Watch.”

With relief, I settled down into letting her be the expert. With any luck, even without help from Katie I would have enough testimony from Dr. Polacci to get her acquitted. We worked side by side in silence, the dust motes rising in the glow that filtered through the shed’s walls. When our baskets were almost empty, I looked up. “You want to pick some more?”

“Only if you want to,” Katie answered, deferring-as the Amish always did-to someone else’s opinion.

The door to the shed flew open, the sun backlighting a tall man in a suit. It had to be Coop; although he usually dressed casually when he visited Katie, occasionally he drove straight from the office-and at any rate, he was the only male I could think of who’d be wearing anything other than suspendered trousers. I stood, a smile on my face as he walked inside.

“You,” Stephen said, grinning, “are one tough woman to find.”

For a moment I could not move. Then I set down the stick and managed to find my voice. “What are you doing here?”

He laughed. “Well, that’s not quite the hello I was thinking of during the drive, but I can see you’re meeting with a client.” Stephen offered his hand to Katie. “Hi there,” he said. “Stephen Chatham.” Glancing around the shed, he stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Is this some kind of occupational therapy?”

I could barely grasp the fact that Stephen was here. “It’s a cash crop,” I said finally.

All the while, Katie was darting glances at me, wisely remaining silent. I could not look at Stephen without imagining Coop standing beside him. Stephen didn’t have Coop’s pale green eyes. Stephen looked too polished. Stephen’s smile seemed practiced, instead of a flag unfurled.

“You know, I’m actually quite busy,” I hedged.

“The only case I see you actively working on involves ten-packs of Marlboro Lights. Which is why you ought to thank me. I’m guessing that access to law libraries in Amish country is limited at best, so I took the liberty of pulling some verdicts for you to look over.” He reached into a portfolio and extracted a thick sheaf of papers. “Three neonaticides that walked under Pennsylvania law. One of which, believe it or not, was an insanity defense.”

“How did you know I noticed up insanity?”

Stephen shrugged. “This case is generating a lot of buzz, Ellie. Word gets around.”

I was about to respond when Katie suddenly pushed between us, running from the shed without a backward glance.

Sarah invited Stephen to dinner, but he didn’t want to accept the invitation. “Let me take you out,” he suggested. “We can go to one of those homey Amish places in town, if you want.”

As if, leaving this household, the first thing I’d want to do is eat the same thing all over again. “They’re not Amish,” I said, just to be fractious. “Anyone who’s truly Plain wouldn’t advertise their religion on the sign.”

“Well, then, there’s always McDonald’s.”

I glanced into the kitchen, where Sarah and Katie were hard at work preparing dinner-a chore that I’d be helping with, had Stephen not arrived. Sarah peered over her shoulder at us, caught my eye, and turned away quickly in embarrassment.

Folding my arms across my chest, I said, “How come you can’t eat here?”

“I just thought that you’d-”

“Well, you thought wrong, Stephen. I’d actually prefer to have dinner with the Fishers.” I could not say why, but it was important to me that Sarah and Katie know I’d rather be with them than Stephen. That they understand I wasn’t pining to get away as quickly as possible.

Somehow, over the past few months, these people had become my friends.

Stephen held up his hands, crying peace. “Whatever you want, Ellie. Dinner with Ma and Pa Kettle will be just fine.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Stephen. Maybe they dress differently and pray more often than you do, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t hear you being an idiot.”

Stephen sobered quickly. “I didn’t mean to offend anyone. I only figured after-what, four months here? You might be anxious for a little intellectual banter.” He took my hand, tugging me out of the range of the doorway, so that Sarah and Katie couldn’t see us. “I’ve missed you,” he said. “Truth is, I wanted you all to myself.”

I saw him coming closer to kiss me and froze-a deer in the headlights, unable to stop what was about to happen. Stephen’s mouth was warm on mine, his hands crossing the map of my back, but my mind was running. After eight years, how could being in Stephen’s arms feel less comfortable than being in Coop’s?

With a small, tight smile, I flattened my hands against Stephen’s chest. “Not now,” I whispered. “Why don’t you walk around the farm while I help with supper?”

An hour later, when the family gathered at the table, all my doubts about Stephen were laid to rest. He bowed his head solemnly at the silent prayer; he used his charm on Sarah until she couldn’t pass him a serving dish without blushing the color of a plum; he talked about silage as if the subject interested him even more than the law. I should have known that this would be fine: the Fishers were generous and friendly; Stephen was a consummate actor. By the time Sarah served the main course-a pot roast, chicken pie, and turkey stroganoff-I had relaxed enough to take my first bite of food.

Katie was telling a hilarious story about the time the cows got out of the barn in the middle of a snowstorm when there was a knock at the door. Elam went to open it, but before the older man could get there, the visitor let himself in. “Hey,” Coop said, shrugging out of his coat. “Am I too late for dessert?”

Like me, he’d become an adopted member of the Fisher family. After the first month, even Aaron stopped objecting with mutinous silence when Sarah graciously offered him dinner on the days he met with Katie or visited me. His eyes lit on mine and warmed-that was all the contact we allowed each other, in front of others. Then he saw Stephen sitting next to me.

Stephen was already getting to his feet, one hand on my shoulder and the other extended. “Stephen Chatham,” he said, smiling quizzically. “Have we met?”

“John Cooper. And yes, I think we have,” Coop said, so smoothly I could have kissed him right then and there. “At the opera.”

“Symphony,” I murmured.

Both men looked at me.

“Coop’s taken Katie on as a patient,” I explained.

“Coop,” Stephen repeated slowly, and I saw him making the synaptic connections: the abbreviated nickname, the snapshots jammed into the back of my college yearbook, the conversations we’d had under a blanket of darkness about our past lovers, when we were still safe and secure in each other’s arms. “That’s right. You knew Ellie from Penn.”

Coop looked at me reluctantly, as if he didn’t trust himself to control whatever emotions might play across his face. “Yeah. It’s been a while.”

I had never been more thankful for the Amish belief that intimate relationships were matters only for the interest of the two people involved. Katie was meticulously cutting the meat on her plate; Sarah found something to attend to in the kitchen; the other men began to discuss when they were planning to fill the silos. Drawing a deep breath, I sat down. “Well,” I said, my voice high and bright. “Who’s hungry?”

Outside, a light wind whistled through the trees, playing them like pipes. Stephen and I walked beneath the overturned bowl of the sky, close enough to feel each other’s body heat without actually touching. “The whole case is riding on the forensic psychiatrist,” I told him. “If the jury doesn’t buy her, Katie’s screwed.”

“Then let’s hope the jury buys her,” Stephen said gallantly, when I knew he was thinking that we didn’t have a prayer.

“Maybe it won’t come to that. Maybe I’ll get a mistrial.”

Stephen pulled the lapels of his coat up. “How’s that?”

“I motioned for one on the grounds that Katie won’t be tried by a jury of her peers.”

He smiled slyly. “Meaning there won’t be a single Amish body among the twelve?”

“Yup.”

“I thought participation in the legal system was against their religion?”

“It might as well be. Like I said: she won’t be tried by a jury of her peers.”

Stephen burst out laughing. “God, El. You’re never gonna win it, but it’s one hell of an appealable issue. This backwater judge isn’t going to know what hit her.” He stepped in front of me in one smooth maneuver, so that I walked into his open arms. “You are something else,” he murmured against my ear.

Maybe it was the way I lighted in his embrace, or the millisecond it took my body to relax against his-something made Stephen draw back. He spread his hand against my cheek, curving his thumb along my jaw. “So,” he said softly. “It’s like that?”

For a moment, I hesitated, spinning a web in my mind that I could use to catch him as he fell, the same way I’d lied to Coop when I broke up with him years ago. I had always believed that some lies could do more good than harm, and therein lay the justification: I’m not good enough for you; I’m too busy to concentrate on a relationship right now; I just need some time to myself.

Then I thought of Katie, kneeling in front of her congregation and telling them what they wanted to hear.

I covered his hand with my own. “Yeah. It’s like that.”

He pulled our linked fingers down between us, swinging like a pendulum. Stephen, who had always looked so sure of himself, suddenly seemed hollow and fragile, like the husks of maple seeds that helicoptered down from the trees.

He lifted my hand so that my fingers opened like a rose. “Does he love you?”

“He does,” I said, swallowing, slipping my hand into my pocket.

“Do you love him?”

I didn’t respond right away. I turned my head, so that I could see the yellow rectangle of light that was the kitchen window, and the silhouettes of Sarah and Coop bent over the double sink. Coop had volunteered to clear the table with her, so that Stephen and I could take a walk on our own. I wondered if he was thinking of me; if he had any doubt about what I was saying.

Stephen was smiling faintly when I looked at him again. He held a finger to my lips. “Asked and answered,” he said; then gently kissed my cheek and walked off toward his car.

I wandered for a while by myself, down the stream and toward the pond, where I sat on the small bench. This break from Stephen was what I had wanted when I left Philadelphia, yet that didn’t stop me from feeling like I had been sucker-punched. I drew up my knees and watched the moon scrawl calligraphy on the surface of the water, listened to the creaks and trills of the earth going still for the night.

When he came, all he did was hold out his hand. Without a word I stood, went into Coop’s arms, and held on tight.

Sarah leaned against her shovel and raised her face to the sky. “Every time we fill the silos,” she mused, “that’s how I know the weather’s going to turn.”

I wiped the sweat off my brow for what must have been the hundredth time that day. “Maybe if we concentrate it will turn in the next five minutes.”

Katie laughed. “Last year when we filled the silos it was eighty degrees. Indian summer.”

Sarah shaded her eyes, squinting into the fields. “Oh, they’re coming!”

The sight took my breath away. Aaron and Samuel were driving the team of mules, which pulled a gasoline-powered corn binder. The contraption was over six feet tall, with knives in the front for cutting down the field corn, and a mechanism that bundled it into sheaves. Beside it, Levi drove another team that pulled a wagon. Coop stood in the back, tossing the tall bundles of corn that came off the binder into the flatbed.

Coop grinned and waved when he saw me. He was wearing jeans, a polo shirt, and one of Aaron’s broad-brimmed hats to keep the sun off his face. He was so proud you’d think he’d cut every stalk himself.

“Look at you,” Katie said, nudging against me. “You’ve gone all ferhoodled.”

I hadn’t a clue what it meant, but it certainly sounded the way I felt. I smiled back at Coop and waited for him to jump down from the wagon. Levi, with all the self-importance of a preteen, swaggered toward the conveyor belt beneath the silo and hooked it up so that the gas engine could run the belt and the chopping machine and the big fan that blew the corn up a chute to the silo.

Sarah climbed into the wagon bed to toss down the first sheaf of corn; then I followed. Bits of husk and stalk stuck to my cheeks and the back of my neck. The chopped corn was damp and sweet, with a tang to it that reminded me of alcohol. Then again, the silage fed to the herd all winter was just a step away from fermented corn mash. Maybe that’s why cows always looked so placid-they spent the winter drunk.

As Aaron tended to the horses and Coop and Levi hauled corn over the lip of the wagon, Samuel jumped down. With great curiosity I watched him approach Katie. It had to be uncomfortable for her, seeing him day in and day out on the farm when their relationship had taken such a turn for the worse-but recently, Katie had grown even more upset. Every time Samuel came within ten feet of her, she did her best to escape. I’d chalked it up to her nervousness about the impending trial, until Sarah casually mentioned that November was the month for weddings; soon enough, the couples who intended to get married would be published in church.

If things had gone slightly different, Katie and Samuel would have been one of them.

“Here,” Samuel said. “Let me.” He rested his hand on Katie’s shoulder and took the tall bundle of corn from her hands. With sure, strong motions, he set the heavy stack on the conveyor belt while Katie stood back and watched.

“Samuel!” At Aaron’s shout, Samuel gave an apologetic grin and relinquished his position to Katie again.

She immediately reached up for another sheaf of corn. The bristling stalks groaned to the top of the belt. The mules, unhitched now, stamped and shuffled. And although she did not say a word, as Sarah worked with her daughter, she was smiling.

Teresa Polacci was coming to go over the testimony for her direct examination on a day when heavy gray clouds had been rolling across the sky for hours, threatening a downpour. In the milk room, where I sat in front of my computer, the wind pressed up against the windows and screamed beneath the cracks of the doors.

“So after we discuss dissociation,” I mused aloud, “we’ll-” I broke off as a kitten began to use my leg as a clawing post. “Hey, Katie, do you mind?”

On her belly on the linoleum floor, with the rest of the litter of barn kittens crawling over her back and legs, Katie sighed. She got to her hands and knees, knocking off all but one cat, which rode on her shoulder, and pulled the kitten off my jeans.

“All right. So we go through the basic profile of a woman who commits neonaticide, talk about dissociation, and then walk through your interview with Dr. Polacci.”

Katie turned. “Will I have to sit there and listen to you say all these things?”

“You mean in the courtroom? Yeah. You’re the defendant.”

“Then why don’t you just let me do it?”

“Get on the stand, you mean? Because the prosecutor would rip you to pieces. If Dr. Polacci tells your story, the jury is more likely to find you sympathetic.”

Katie blinked. “What’s so unsympathetic about falling asleep?”

“First off, if you stand up there and say that you fell asleep and didn’t kill the baby, it goes against our defense. Second, your story is harder for the jury to believe.”

“But it’s the truth.”

The psychiatrist had warned me about this-that Katie might be mulishly set on her amnesic explanation of events for some time yet. “Well, Dr. Polacci’s testified in dozens of cases like this one. If you got on the stand, it would be the first time. Don’t you feel a little safer going with an expert?”

Katie rolled one of the kittens into a ball in the palm of her hand. “How many cases have you done, Ellie?”

“Hundreds.”

“Do you always win?”

I frowned. “Not always,” I admitted. “Most of the time.”

“You want to win this one, don’t you?”

“Of course. That’s why I’m using this defense. And you should go along with it because you want to win, too.”

Katie held her hand high so that one of the kittens leaped over it. Then she looked right at me. “But if you win,” she said, “I still lose.”

The smell of sawdust carried on the air and the high whine of hydraulic-powered saws sliced through the sky as nearly sixty Amishmen puzzled together the wooden skeleton of a huge barn wall. All shapes and sizes and ages, the men wore carpenter’s pouches around their waists, stuffed with nails and a hammer. Young boys, let out early from school for the event, scrambled around in an effort to be useful.

I stood on the hill with the other women, my arms crossed as I watched the magic of a barn raising. The four walls lay flat on the ground, assembled two-dimensionally at first. A handful of men stationed themselves along what would be the western wall, taking positions a few feet apart from each other. The man whose barn this would be, Martin Zook, took a spot a distance apart. On a count given by him in the Dialect, the others picked up the frame of the wall and began to walk it upright. Martin came up behind them, holding the wall in place with a long stick, while Aaron took up a stick to secure the far side. Ten more men swarmed to the base of the wall, hammering it into place in a volley of staccato pounding. One man began to walk along the cement foundation, setting nails with a single swipe of his hammer at intervals along the wood base that joined it, while a pair of eager schoolboys trailed him, using three or four sharp blows to drive the nails home.

Mixed with the sweet, raw scent of new construction was the heavier tang of the men’s sweat as they hoisted the other walls into place, secured them, and climbed the wooden rigging like monkeys to fasten the boards of the roof. I thought of the workers who’d put a new roof on our house when I was sixteen and in awe of men’s chests: parading on the black tar paper, their feet canted at an angle, their heads wrapped in bandannas and their torsos bare, their boomboxes beating. These men seemed to be working twice as hard as that long-ago crew; yet not a single one had given into the heat past rolling up the sleeves of their pale shirts.

“Fine day for this,” Sarah said behind my back to another woman, as they set out dishes on the long picnic tables.

“Not too hot, not too cold,” the woman agreed. She was Martin Zook’s wife, and I had been introduced to her, but I couldn’t remember her name. She bustled past Sarah and laid a platter of fried chicken on the table. Then she cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled, “Komm esse!”

Almost in unison, everyone laid down his hammer and nails and untied his canvas waist pouch. The boys, who still had energy, ran ahead to an old washtub set outside the kitchen, filled with water. A bar of Ivory soap bobbed on its surface. Huddled shoulder to shoulder, the boys slipped the soap from one fist to another with squelching fart noises and lots of grinning. They patted their forearms dry with light blue towels, giving up their spots at the washtub to the red-faced, sweating men.

Martin Zook sat down, his sons on his right and his left. Men fell into empty spots at the table. Martin lowered his head, and for a moment the only sound was the creak of the benches beneath the men and the measured beat of their breathing. Then Martin looked up and reached for the chicken.

I would have expected boisterous conversation-at the very least, discussion of how much longer it would take to finish the barn. But hardly anyone spoke. Men shoveled food into their mouths, too hungry for niceties.

“Save room, now,” Martin’s wife said, leaning over the table with a refilled platter of chicken. “Sarah made her squash pie.”

When Samuel spoke, it was all the more arresting because of the lack of chatter at the table. “Katie,” he said, surprising her so that she jumped, “is this your potato salad?”

“Why, you know it is,” Sarah answered. “Katie’s the only one who puts in tomatoes.”

Samuel took another helping. “Good thing, since that’s how I’ve grown to like it.”

The others at the table continued to devour their lunch, as if they had not been witness to the furious blush that rose on Katie’s face, or Samuel’s slow smile, or this uncharacteristically public championing. And a few minutes later when the men rose, leaving us behind to clean up, Katie was still staring off in the direction of the barn.

The Tupperware had been cleaned and returned to the women who’d brought the food. Nails had been gathered up in brown paper bags, and hammers tucked beneath the bench seats of buggies. The barn stood proud and raw and yellow, a new silhouette carved into a sky as purple as a bruise.

“Ellie?”

I turned, surprised by the voice. “Samuel.”

He was holding his hat in his hands, running it around and around by the brim like an exercise wheel. “I thought you maybe would like to see the inside.”

“Of the barn?” In all the hours we’d been at the barn raising, I hadn’t seen a single woman stray toward the construction site. “I’d love to.”

I walked beside him, unsure of what to say. The last true private conversation we’d had had ended with Samuel sobbing over Katie’s pregnancy. In the end, I took the Amish way out-I did not say anything, but instead moved companionably alongside him.

The barn seemed even larger from the inside than from the outside. Thick beams crossed over my head, fragrant pine that would be here for decades. The high gambrel roof arched like a pale, artificial sky; and when I touched the posts that supported the animal stalls, a confetti of sawdust rained down on me.

“This is really something,” I said. “To build a whole barn in a single day.”

“It only looks like such a big thing when it’s one man by himself.”

Not much different from my own philosophy to my clients-although having an ardent attorney by your side to help you out of a bind paled in comparison to having fifty friends and relatives ready in an instant.

“I need to talk to you,” Samuel said, clearly uncomfortable.

I smiled at him. “Talk away.”

He frowned, puzzling out my English, and then shook his head. “Katie . . . she’s doing all right?”

“Yes. And that was a nice thing you did for her, today at lunch.”

Samuel shrugged. “It was nothing.” He turned, gnawing at his thumbnail. “I’ve been thinking about this court.”

“You mean the trial?”

“Ja. The trial. And the more I think about it, it’s not so different from anything else. Martin Zook didn’t have to look up at that pile of lumber all by himself.”

If this was some roundabout Amish reasoning, I was missing the mark. “Samuel, I’m not quite sure-”

“I want to help,” he interrupted. “I want to work with Katie in the court so she don’t have to be all alone.”

Samuel’s face was dark and set; he had given this much thought. “Building a barn isn’t forbidden by the Ordnung,” I said gently. “But I don’t know how the bishop will feel if you willingly take the role of character witness in a murder trial.”

“I will speak to Bishop Ephram,” Samuel said.

“And if he says no?”

Samuel tightened his mouth. “An English judge won’t care about the Meidung.”

No, a superior court judge wouldn’t give a damn if a witness was being shunned by his religious community. But Samuel might. And Katie.

I looked over his shoulder at the sturdy walls, the right angles, the roof that would keep out the rain. “We’ll see,” I answered.

“Now what?”

Katie snipped off a thread between her teeth and looked up at me. “Now you’re done.”

My jaw dropped. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope.” Katie spread her hands over the small quilt, a log cabin pattern with hints of yellow, purples, deep blues, and a streak of rose. When I had first arrived at the Fishers, shamelessly unable to sew on a button, Sarah and Katie decided I was a worthy cause. With their help, I’d learned how to baste and pin and sew. Each night when the family gathered after dinner-to read the newspaper, or play backgammon or Yahtzee, or-like Elam-just doze off and snore, Katie and I would bend over the small frame of my quilt, and piece it together. And now it was finished.

Sarah lifted her face from her mending. “Ellie’s done?”

Beaming, I nodded. “Want to see?”

Even Aaron put down the paper. “Of course,” he joked. “This is the biggest event since Omar Lapp sold his twenty acres to that real estate developer from Harrisburg.” He lowered his voice. “And just about as unlikely.” But he was grinning, too, as Katie helped me unfasten the quilt from the frame and hold it up to my chest with pride.

I knew that if Katie had completed a quilt, she wouldn’t show it off so, and it would have been far more worthy of praise. I knew that the stitches on her side of the quilt were neat and even as baby teeth, while mine scurried drunk across the marked pencil lines. “Well, that’s just fine, Ellie,” Sarah said.

Elam, in the La-Z-Boy, opened one eye. “Won’t even keep her feet warm in the winter.”

“It’s supposed to be small,” I argued, then turned to Katie. “Isn’t it?”

“Ja. It’s like a baby quilt. For all those children still to come,” she said with a smile.

I rolled my eyes. “Don’t go holding your breath.”

“Most Plain women your age are only half done with having their children.”

“Most Plain women my age have been married for twenty years,” I pointed out.

“Katie,” Sarah warned, “leave Ellie be.”

I folded my quilt as carefully as a fallen soldier’s flag and hugged it. “See? Even your mother agrees with me.”

A terrible silence fell over the room, and almost immediately I realized my mistake. Sarah Fisher didn’t agree with me-at forty-three, she’d have given her right arm to be still bearing children, but the decision had been taken out of her hands.

I turned to her. “I’m sorry. That was very tactless of me.”

Sarah was still for a moment, then she shrugged and took the quilt. “You’d like me to iron this for you?” she asked, hurrying from the room before I could tell her that I’d rather she sit down and relax.

I looked around, but Katie and Aaron and Elam were back in their seats, quietly occupied, as if I had never spoken thoughtlessly at all.

In the next instant there was a knock at the door, and I rose to answer it. I could tell from the look that crossed between Aaron and Elam that in their minds, a caller arriving this late on a weeknight was a sure messenger of trouble. My hand had just reached the knob when the door swung open, pushed from the outside. Jacob Fisher stood there. He met my stunned gaze first, a wry and nervous smile playing over his lips. “Hey-Mom-I’m-home,” he said breezily, a parody of TV sitcoms that only the two of us would even understand. “What’s for supper?”

Sarah came running first, drawn by the sound of a son she had not seen in years. Her hand clapped over her mouth, her eyes smiling through tears, she was a yard away from Jacob when Aaron stopped her by simply slashing his arm through the air and saying, “No.”

He advanced on his son, and in deference Sarah melted against the wall. “You are no longer welcome here.”

“Why, Dat?” Jacob asked. “It’s not because the bishop said so. And who are you to make a rule stronger than the Ordnung?” He stepped further inside. “I miss my family.”

Sarah gasped. “You will come back to the church?”

“No, Mam, I can’t. But I want badly to come back to my home.” Aaron stood toe to toe with his son, his throat working. Then, without saying a word, he turned and walked out of the room. A few seconds later a door slammed in the rear of the house.

Elam patted Jacob on the shoulder, then moved slowly in the direction his own son had gone. Sarah, tears running down her face, held her hands out to her oldest child. “Oh, I can’t believe this. I can’t believe it’s you.”

As I watched her, I understood why a mother would starve herself to feed a baby; how there was always time and room for a child to curl close to her side; how she could be soft enough to serve as a pillow and strong enough to move heaven and earth. Sarah’s fingers traced the slopes and planes of Jacob’s face: beardless, older, different. “My boy,” she whispered. “My beautiful boy.”

In that moment, I could see the girl she had been at eighteen-slender and strong, shyly offering up this brand-new infant to her young husband. She squeezed Jacob’s hands, wanting him all to herself, even when Katie leaped up like a puppy to get her own embrace. Jacob met my gaze over the women’s heads. “Ellie, it’s good to see you again.”

Jacob had quickly agreed to serve as a character witness for Katie-the best I could do, since there was no way her mother or father was going to set foot on the witness stand. I had been working on his direct examination questions just that day. However, I’d planned to rehearse with him in State College, simply because I believed it was too difficult to sneak him close to the farm without raising Aaron’s suspicions. But now it looked as if Jacob was playing by his own rules.

He let Sarah lead him into the kitchen for some hot chocolate-was that still his favorite?-and one of the muffins she’d made that morning. I noticed, and I’m sure Jacob did too, that when he settled down to eat, the baptized members of the family stood, overjoyed at the reconciliation but still unable to sit at a table with an excommunicated Amishman.

“Why did you come back?” Katie asked.

“It was time,” Jacob answered. “Well, it was time for you and Mam to see me, anyway.”

Sarah looked away. “Your father was wonderful mad when he found out Katie had been coming to visit you. We disobeyed him, and he’s smarting.” She added, “It’s not that he doesn’t want to see you, or that he doesn’t love you. He’s a fine man, hard on others-but hardest on himself. When you made the decision to leave the church, he didn’t blame you.”

Jacob snorted. “That’s not how I remember it.”

“It’s true. He blamed himself, for being your father and not bringing you up in a way that made you want to stay.”

“My book learning had nothing to do with him.”

“Maybe to you,” Sarah said. “But not to your Dat.” She patted Jacob’s shoulder and kept her hand there, as if she was loath to let him go. “All these years, he has been punishing himself.”

“By banishing me?”

“By giving up the one thing he wanted more than anything else,” Sarah answered quietly. “His son.”

Jacob stood abruptly and looked at Katie. “You want to take a walk?”

She nodded, radiant to be singled out. They had nearly reached the back door when Sarah called to Jacob, “You’ll stay the night?”

He shook his head. “I won’t do that to you,” he said softly. “But whether he likes it or not, Mam, I’ll keep coming back.”

Sometimes when I was lying in my bed at the Fishers’, I wondered if I would ever be able to adapt back to city living. What would it be like to fall asleep to the sound of buses chugging, instead of owls? To close my eyes in a room that never got completely dark, thanks to the neon signs and floodlamps on the streets? To work in a building so high off the ground that I could not smell the clover and the dandelions under my feet?

That night the moon rose yellow as a wolf’s eye, blinking back at me in my bed, where I waited for Katie to return from her walk with Jacob. I had hoped to talk to him about his testimony a little bit, but he and Katie had disappeared and had not come back, not by the time Elam made his way back to the grossdawdi haus, nor when Aaron returned from a last check on the livestock and headed upstairs in silence, nor even when Sarah went from room to room, turning off gas lanterns for the night.

In fact, it was well after two in the morning when Katie finally slipped into the bedroom. “I’m awake,” I announced. “So don’t worry about keeping quiet.”

Katie paused in the act of removing her apron, then nodded and continued. Keeping her back modestly turned, she slipped off her dress and hung it on one of the wooden pegs lining the walls, then pulled her nightgown over her head.

“It must have been nice, having Jacob all to yourself.”

“Ja,” Katie murmured, with none of the enthusiasm I would have expected.

Concerned, I came up on one elbow. “You all right?”

She managed a smile. “Tired, is all. We talked some about the trial, and it wore me out.” After a moment she added, “I said you would be telling everyone I was crazy.”

Not quite the terminology I’d have used, but there you had it. “What does Jacob think?”

“He said you were a good lawyer, and you knew what you were doing.”

“Bright boy. What else did he say?”

Katie shrugged. “Stuff,” she said quietly. “Stuff about himself.”

Leaning back again, I folded my arms beneath my head. “I bet he threw your father for a loop tonight.”

When there was no response, I assumed Katie had fallen asleep. I jumped when she swung out of bed in a quick motion and yanked on the blinds. “That moon,” she muttered. “It’s too light to get any rest.”

The blackout shades in the bedroom were hunter green, like every other blackout shade in the house. It was one of the ways you could tell an Amish place from an English one-the color of the shades, and the lack of electrical wires winnowing toward the house.

“How come the shades are green?” I asked, certain that there was an explanation for this, as for every other oddity of Amish life.

Katie’s face was turned away from me, her voice coated thick. If not for the mundane question I’d asked, I would have thought she was crying. “Because,” she said, “that’s the way it’s always been.”

I had gotten into the habit of taking only coffee in the morning, certain that my exit from the Fishers’ would coincide with an angioplasty if I didn’t watch myself more closely. But the day of the final pretrial hearing, when I came down to the kitchen wearing my red knock-’em-dead power suit, Sarah handed me a platter of eggs and bacon, flapjacks, toast, and honey. She even pushed me to have seconds. She was feeding me like she fed Aaron and Samuel, men who worked long, hard hours in order to preserve her way of life.

After only a moment’s thought to my triglycerides, I ate everything she stacked on my plate.

Katie was stationed at the sink while I ate, washing the bowls and pans used to cook. She was wearing her lavender dress and her best apron-her Sunday clothes-for the trip to the superior court. Although she would not be sitting in on the hearing, I wanted the judge to know that she was still firmly in my custody.

She turned to set a freshly washed mixing bowl on the counter, but it slipped out of her hand. “Oh!” she cried, grasping for it, fumbling in a comedy of errors to keep it from shattering on the floor. With pure luck, she managed to catch it, and hugged it close to her middle-only to move too quickly and knock a pitcher off the counter with her elbow, sending pottery shards and orange juice across the kitchen floor.

One look at the mess, and Katie burst into tears. Sarah scolded her gently in Dietsch, while Katie knelt to pick up the biggest slivers of the broken pitcher. I set my napkin on the table and got down on the floor to help her. “You’re jittery.”

Katie rocked back on her heels. “It’s just . . . all of a sudden, Ellie, this is very real.”

Sarah reached between us, mopping up the orange juice with a dish towel. Over her strong back I met Katie’s gaze and smiled. “Trust me. I know what I’m doing.”

I knew it had rattled George Callahan to pass Katie, sitting serene and sweet on a bench just outside the judge’s chambers. He kept peering beyond the court reporter who’d come for the private hearing into the open doorway, where Katie was visible. “What’s your client doing here?” he finally hissed at me.

I made a big show out of craning my neck and studying Katie. “Praying, I think.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Oh, why did I bring her to court? Well, gosh, George. You should understand better than anyone. It’s part of the bail contingency.”

Judge Ledbetter bustled in. “Sorry I’m late,” she said, taking a seat behind her desk. She opened a file and scanned it. “Might I just say, Ms. Hathaway, how glad I am that you finally got around to noticing up your insanity defense?” She turned a page. “Any motions either of you plan to submit?”

“I’ve filed a motion to dismiss, Your Honor,” I said.

“Yes, I know. Why?”

“Because my client is being denied a constitutional right-a fair trial among her peers. However, not a single Amishman or woman will be sitting on that jury. In our society-in our system-her peers do not exist.” I took a deep breath as the judge’s eyes narrowed slightly. “I would consider asking for a trial in front of a judge, or even asking for a change of venue, but neither applies here-either of those options would still compromise her right to fair trial. A typical jury that’s a cross-section of America is not a cross-section of an Amish community, Your Honor. And if my client is not judged by people who understand her faith and her upbringing and, well, her world-then she’s at a marked disadvantage.”

The judge turned to the district attorney. “Mr. Callahan?”

“Your Honor, the fact remains that Ms. Fisher broke a law of the United States government. She is going to be tried in a United States court of law. It doesn’t matter if she’s Amish, Buddhist, or Zulu-she played with fire, and she is now required to deal with the consequences of her actions.”

“Oh, please. She’s not an international terrorist who set off a bomb in the World Trade Center. She’s an American citizen, which entitles her to objective treatment under the law.”

George turned, and said under his breath, “American citizens pay taxes.”

“Excuse me, I don’t think the court reporter quite got that,” the judge commented.

I smiled at her. “The county attorney was just erroneously making assumptions about my client’s fiscal responsibility. The Amish pay taxes, George. If they’re self-employed, they don’t pay Social Security, because they don’t use Medicare or Medicaid or any of the other services it funds, since they believe in caring for their own elderly. If they’re employed by someone else, they get Social Security taken out of their paychecks and never use a penny of it. The Amish don’t pay gasoline taxes, but they pay real estate taxes, which support public schools they don’t even use. They also don’t take advantage of federal agriculture subsidies, welfare, and student loans.” Turning to the judge, I said, “This is my point exactly, Judge Ledbetter. If the prosecutor in this case is already coming into court with preconceived misconceptions about the Amish, that prejudice will be multiplied by twelve on a traditional jury.”

The judge pinched the bridge of her nose. “You know, Ms. Hathaway, I’ve actually given this motion of yours a great deal of thought. It’s extremely distressing for me to think that a United States citizen might, simply by religious affiliation, not be able to get a fair trial. What you said in your brief is absolutely valid.”

“Thank you, Your Honor.”

“Unfortunately for you and your client, what Mr. Callahan just said in response is absolutely valid as well. We have a defendant on trial for murder here, not for stealing a pack of gum. It’s irresponsible to dismiss a trial of such magnitude. And although I think we can all pretty much guarantee that not a single Amish person will sit on that jury, the truth is, Ms. Hathaway, your client wouldn’t get a jury of her peers no matter what court in America this case winds up in. At least in Lancaster she’ll have the next best thing: twelve people who live and work in this community with the Amish on a daily basis. Twelve people who, one hopes, are slightly more knowledgeable about their Amish neighbors than the average cross-section of America.” She looked directly at me. “I’m going to deny your motion to dismiss, Ms. Hathaway, but I thank you for bringing up a provocative subject.” The judge flattened her hands on top of her desk. “Now, if there’s nothing else, I’d like to set the date for jury selection.”

“Three and a half weeks,” I said, letting the sheet float down over the bed in Elam’s grossdawdi haus. “That’s when the trial starts.”

Sarah tucked in the linens across from me and exhaled with relief. “I can’t wait until it’s over,” she said. Turning troubled eyes to Katie, she asked, “Was it upsetting to be there?”

“Katie spent the hearing sitting on a bench outside the judge’s office. At the trial, she’ll be sitting beside me at the defense table. The prosecutor’s never going to be able to get the chance to upset her, because she won’t be on the witness stand. That was part of the reason we decided to use an insanity defense.”

Katie finished stuffing the final pillow into a fresh case. At that last sentence, she cried out, so softly that I was surprised both Sarah and I had heard it. “Will you stop? Will you please just stop?” With an anguished groan, she turned on her heel and left.

Sarah picked up her skirts and began to hurry after Katie, but I stayed her with a hand on her arm. “Please,” I said gently. “Let me.”

At first I didn’t see her, curled into a small knot in the rocking chair. I closed the door and sat down on my bed, then used a strategy I’d learned from Coop-I just shut up and waited. “I can’t do this,” she said, her face still buried against her knees. “I can’t live this way.”

Every nerve in my body snapped alert. As a defense attorney, I’d heard those words dozens of times-usually prefacing a gut-wrenching confession. At this point, even if Katie told me she’d murdered that infant in cold blood, I would still use the insanity defense to get her off-but I also knew I’d fight a lot harder for her if I could believe, for whatever reason, that she truly didn’t know what she had been doing at the time. “Katie,” I said. “Don’t tell me anything.”

That got her attention. “After months of pushing me, you say that?”

“Tell Coop, if you have to. But I’m going to mount a much more compelling defense if we don’t have the conversation you want to have.”

She shook her head. “I can’t let you get up there and lie about me.”

“It’s not a lie, Katie. Even you don’t know what happened, exactly. You told Coop and Dr. Polacci there are things you can’t remember.”

Katie leaned forward. “I do remember.”

My pulse began to pound behind my temples. “Your memory keeps changing, Katie. It’s changed at least three times since I met you.”

“The father of the baby is a man named Adam Sinclair. He owned the apartment that Jacob rents in State College. He left before he ever found out . . . that I was having a baby.” Her words were soft, her face even softer. “I blocked it all out, at first. And by the time I could admit what had happened, it was too late. So I kept pretending things were the way they had always been.

“I fell asleep after I had the baby in the barn. I was going to go inside and take him to my mother, Ellie, but my legs were too shaky to stand. I just wanted to rest a minute. And then the next thing I knew, I woke up.” She blinked at me. “The baby was gone.”

“Why didn’t you go to look for it?”

“I was so scared. More scared than I was about my parents finding out, because the whole time I was telling myself that this was the Lord’s will, I think I knew what I was going to discover. And I didn’t want to.”

I stared hard at her. “You still could have killed that baby, Katie. You could have sleepwalked. You could have smothered him without knowing what you were doing.”

“No.” By now, she was crying again, her face red and blotchy. “I couldn’t have, Ellie. Once I saw that baby, I wanted him. I wanted him so much.” Her voice fell to a whisper. “In my life, that baby was the best thing-and the worst thing-I’d ever done.”

“Was the baby alive when you fell asleep?”

She nodded.

“Then who killed it?” I stood up, angry. Eleventh-hour confessions were not the stuff of great defenses. “It was two in the morning, it was two months before your due date, and no one knew you were pregnant. Who the hell else came in there and killed that baby?”

“I don’t know,” Katie sobbed. “I don’t know, but it wasn’t me, and you can’t go into that trial and tell them I did.” She looked up at me. “Don’t you see what’s happened since I started lying? My whole world has come apart, Ellie. A baby’s died. Everything’s gone wrong.” She fisted her hands and buried them in her apron. “I want to make my things right.”

The very thought sent me reeling. “We’re not talking about a confession in front of a bunch of ministers, Katie. That may get you redemption in the Amish church, but in a court of law, it’ll get you fifteen years to life.”

“I don’t understand-”

“No, you don’t. That’s why you hired me, an attorney-to lead you through the court system. The only way you’re going to be acquitted is if I get up there and use a good defense. And the best one we’ve got is insanity. No jury in the world is going to buy you on the witness stand, saying that you fell asleep and woke up and whaddaya know, the baby was missing. And so very conveniently dead, too.”

Katie set her jaw. “But it’s the truth.”

“The only place the truth is going to save you from a charge of first-degree murder is in a perfect world. A court is far from a perfect world. From the moment we walk in there, it’s not about what really happened. It’s about who has the best story to sell to the jury.”

“I don’t care if it’s a perfect world or not,” Katie said. “It’s not my world.”

“You tell the truth on the stand, and the only world you’re going to know is the State Penitentiary.”

“If that’s the Lord’s will, then I’ll accept it.”

Furious, I glared at her. “You want to play martyr? Go ahead. But I’m not going to be sitting next to you while you commit legal suicide.”

For a while Katie was silent. Then she turned to me, eyes wide and clear. “You have to, Ellie. Because I need you.” She sat beside me on the bed, so close that I could feel the heat from her body. “I’m not going to fit into that English courtroom. I’m going to stand out, with how I dress, and how I think, because I’m not English. I don’t know about murder and witnesses and juries, but I do know how to fix things in my life when they’re messed up. If you make a mistake and you repent, you’re forgiven. You’re welcomed back. If you lie, and keep lying, there won’t be a place for you.”

“Your community looked the other way when it came to hiring me,” I said. “They’ll understand why you need to do this, too.”

“But I won’t.” She folded her hands together, as if she were in prayer. “Maybe these lies will get me free, like you say, and I won’t have to go to the English jail. But Ellie, then where do I go? Because if I lie to save myself there, I won’t be able to come back here.”

I closed my eyes and thought about the church service where Katie had gotten down to confess. I thought about the faces of the others sitting in that hot, cramped room as they passed judgment-not vindictive, not spiteful . . . but relieved, as if Katie’s humility made them all a little bit stronger. I thought of the afternoon when we’d all worked to bring in the corn; how it had felt to be a part of something bigger than myself. I thought of Sarah’s face, when she laid eyes on Jacob for the first time in years.

What good was a personal victory to someone who’d spent her life losing herself for the greater good of everyone else?

Katie’s hand, callused and small, slipped into my own. “All right,” I sighed. “Let’s see what we can do.”

II.

Do not let your left hand know

what your right hand is doing.

-Matthew 6:3