The next morning, after the children left for camp, I called Josh on his cell phone, my fingers going right to that particular order of numbers that would bring his voice to my ear. I was always a little nervous calling him. At home, the boys called for the girls, and sometimes I thought that putting Josh’s number into the phone was like shining my lantern into a boy’s window. But Josh always sounded pleased to hear from me, and his cheerful “Well, hi” coming through the phone gave me a thrill.

“Are you working tonight?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Do you want to go out?”

“I need your help solving a mystery,” I said, and explained about my mother’s letter. “I can be there at four,” he said. I read him the address, and he said he’d get his mom’s car and figure out the directions.

Before Rachel left for the library, I showed her the letter. “Josh is coming over at four,” I said. “Do you think you can spare me so I can find out what my mother needs?” Rachel agreed.

I spent the day preparing the family’s dinner and getting all of my chores done. When Josh arrived in his mother’s car, I climbed in beside him. He had printed up directions from the computer, and I read them, watching for street signs. As my mother had guessed, it wasn’t far away, only a twenty-minute drive. When Josh turned onto Elm Street, my eyes scanned the tidy houses. We pulled in front of a modest home with the look of a country cottage. The front door and shutters were a matching shade of green against weathered gray siding. A colorful garden burst in unkempt patches across the small front yard. A white porch swing swayed beside the front door.

“That’s it,” said Josh, pointing to the house that somehow already looked familiar, like a place I should know.

The doorbell buzzed, and I waited, bursting with a curiosity I had never felt before. My finger itched to touch the doorbell again; my foot tapped to a rhythm that was not part of a song. Then I heard the pounding of hurried footsteps and a woman’s voice, almost musical, calling “Com-ing.”

The door opened in a burst, and framed in the doorway was a woman about Rachel’s age. She wore a long, full skirt made of blue jean material, and a crisp, white collared blouse. Around her waist was a colorful sash that flowed down the length of the skirt. Her brown hair fell past her shoulders in a way that, at first glance, made her look like a teenager. But up close I could see tiny lines at the corners of her eyes. Gray eyes. Almost silver.

“May I help you?” she asked. Her voice sounded familiar. Like home.

I opened my lips, but couldn’t find any words. Josh took over, firm and friendly. “I hope we’re not bothering you,” he said. “We’re looking for Beth Winters.”

The woman nodded. “I’m Elizabeth Winters. Everyone calls me Beth.” When she turned her gaze to me, she looked startled for a moment. Her eyes clung to my face. Then she took a step back, pointing vaguely toward the inside of her house. “Would you like to come in?”

Josh and I stepped into her foyer. The colors were muted and settled, like an October afternoon. I felt Josh’s nudge and found my voice.

“My mother wanted me to find you,” I said. The woman looked to be as jittery as I felt.

“And who is your mother?” she asked, a tiny lilt in her voice. The sound settled like a tickle in my throat. I took a long breath before answering.

“My mother is Rebecca. Rebecca Miller.”

Beth Winters gasped, a tiny sound. Then, for a second, her body started to sag. Josh jumped forward and reached out to steady her, but she shook her head. “I’m all right,” she said quickly, her words choked and breathy. She regained her posture, then turned to face me fully, her eyes wide. “You’re too young to be Margaret,” she said. “Which one of Becky’s children are you?”

“I’m Eliza,” I said, waiting for it all to make sense. No one ever called my mother Becky. I was only distantly aware of Josh standing beside me.

“So she named you for me after all,” Beth Winters said. The woman’s eyes welled with tears, and she reached out her hand to touch my cheek. Her fingers were cool and dry against my skin.

“Who are you?” I asked.

The woman smiled. “I’m your Aunt Beth,” she burst out in a hoarse whisper as twin tears rolled down her cheeks. “Your mother was…is my sister.”

The next minutes were a jumble. She stumbled toward me until we were gripped together in a trembling hug, our tears mingling, gulping sounds that were my own cries, Beth’s hand stroking the back of my hair. Josh had stepped back quietly, but he was part of it, too. Finally, Beth and I released each other, our hands grasping each other’s elbows.

“I didn’t know.” It was all I could think to say. Beth motioned us to the couch. She perched on a chair.

Josh looked at me. “Do you understand this?”

I nodded. There was only one explanation, and it was something that I didn’t want to say.

“Go ahead,” said Beth.

The words didn’t want to come. Finally I said them. “She was shunned.” Beth nodded and made it true.

“No way,” said Josh.

I turned back to meet his eyes. I couldn’t think how to respond. “Way,” I said.

Shunned. It was the worst thing that could happen. And here it was before me, in the face of a woman with my mother’s silver eyes. This woman had once worn a kapp and sat in a quilt circle and sung in a one-room schoolhouse. Then something happened that made her have to leave. Forever.

“I suppose you want to hear about it,” Beth said. I nodded. “Okay,” she said. “But first tell me how you came to be here, dressed like an English girl?” She looked at Josh. “And who is this young man?” Josh looked at me expectantly, as though he, too, wanted the answers to these questions. “So,” said Beth, “can I make you dinner while we spill our secrets?”

In the kitchen, Josh and I sat at a wooden table that looked like it belonged in a farmhouse. As Beth moved around, tossing salad ingredients into a wooden bowl and setting pasta to boil in an iron pot, she kept a steady gaze on me.

“I figure that you’re sixteen now,” she said. “And this is your rumspringa.” I nodded. “And this is a boy you met here in the big fancy world.” I grinned at Josh. He smiled back and reached into his pocket, turning off his cell phone. The gesture filled me with gratitude. “Okay, where are you staying? And, more important, how did you get your parents to let you leave home?” While Beth chopped vegetables and added them in handfuls to a simmering pot of sauce, I told her about my dream of leaving the Plain world, and of meeting Rachel at Stranger Night. My voice quavered as the whole mix of emotions came rushing back to me—the letting go and stepping away and reaching for something new.

I looked up and saw that Beth and Josh were watching me intently, waiting for the next part. “Josh can tell the rest,” I said.

“Well,” he began, “I was mowing Rachel’s lawn and I came in for a drink, and here was this girl from another place. And I mean really from another place.” Beth giggled, the laughter of a young girl being tickled. “She’d never heard of the Beatles. She’d never seen a movie, never talked on a phone. It was like, I don’t know, like when a blind person gets her sight. She wanted to see everything.” He paused and looked at me. “And I got to see it all with her.”

I fiddled with a thread that had come loose from the bottom of my shirt. It was strange listening to the way Josh described me. Maybe being called a blind person should have made me angry. But I liked how he sounded so pleased to be a part of my story.

“Well, this all sounds familiar,” Beth was saying. She had a dreamy expression on her face.

I was aching to hear about Beth. “Your turn,” I said. Beth wiped her hands on a dish towel and placed a lid on the pot of sauce before sitting down at the table, across from me.

“Well,” she began, “I was the baby of the family. I watched Miriam grow up the way she was expected to. Then there was your mom. She was more rebellious. She hated cooking, couldn’t ever finish a quilt. Our mother would grumble about how we were ever going to marry her off.”

This didn’t sound right. I had grown up watching my mother’s careful work in the kitchen and with her quilts. There was nothing but competence in her hands.

Beth continued. “When Becky was a little older than you are now, we had financial troubles.” I knew what was coming—my mother, homesick and miserable, working at the tailor shop and sending money home to help her family.

“Our parents planned to send Miriam,” said Beth, “but your mother begged to go. That was fine with Miriam. She was already courting Ike. So off your mother went, with hardly a backward glance. I was heartsick seeing her leave.”

I shook my head. “No, you have it wrong. They forced my mom to go.”

“Not at all,” said Beth. “Your mom couldn’t get out the door fast enough. I was thirteen and I missed her so much. One weekend I got to take the train and stay with her in the city. It was like being in a dream. She showed me television and took me to the movies.”

“Did you see The Sound of Music?” I asked.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, we watched it on video.”

Josh let out a laugh that sounded more like a groan. “You and that movie. I’ve got to rent it for you one day.”

“Afterward,” Beth continued, “it was like coming back from the fair. Everything at home was so common.” I pushed back a worry that it would be the same for me one day.

Beth shoved her chair away from the table and went back to her cooking. A few minutes later, over dinner, I found myself waiting to see if Aunt Beth would bow her head and pause over the mealtime prayer. But she was already stabbing her fork into the lettuce.

She continued with her story. “It was hard to be back home. Miriam was planning for her marriage. I was in my last year at the one-room school. Then your mom came home earlier than we’d expected because my father had been able to clear up our debt. I was so excited to have her home, but she had no time for me. All she cared about was her baptism. I tried to talk to her about her time away, but she brushed me off.”

That sounded more like the mother I knew—practical, organized, never one to linger over details. But I wondered how she’d returned so easily to the life she’d run away from.

“Before I had time to enjoy having Becky back home, she was planning her wedding, and I was alone again. So I finished school and got a job in a quilt shop in town.”

“Selling quilts?”

“Worse,” said Beth. “I sat every day in the middle of the store on a little stool and stitched together squares while the tourists gawked at me. I was miserable. When I turned sixteen, all I wanted was to get out.”

“What did you do?”

“I was not Good Amish,” said Beth, shaking her head. “I hung out with the wildest of the Amish groups. I got drunk on the weekends. I stayed out all night.”

Josh let out a whistle. “You Amish. Who would have believed it?”

Beth laughed. “Miriam and your mom were both married with children by then. I spent time with your mother, and helped her with Margaret and James.” She paused and reached across the table to touch my hand. “Oh, Eliza. I’ll need to hear about everyone. There are others, too, right?”

“Jah,” I said. “One more. My sister Ruthie is eleven. James and my father work together in the furniture shop. Margaret got married last year. She and Jacob have a farm about a mile away.” Beth pressed a napkin to her eyes. “Are you all right?” I asked.

She nodded. “After all these years it’s still hard for me to believe that my sister has children I don’t know.”

“How long has it been?” Josh asked.

“Becky was pregnant with this one here when I left,” she said, nodding toward me. “She told me this was going to be the baby named for me. But then things got a little complicated.”

She got up and started to clear the table, and the story stopped while we all set about tidying the kitchen. Later, sitting in the living room, the dishwasher buzzing, Beth told us about getting a job at the library, where she read about other worlds and thought about her possibilities. But in the end she agreed to be baptized, making the promise to the church.

“Then,” she continued, “one day I was working at the desk and I saw a man bent over his books. He had a rumpled look about him that I liked. At closing time he was still there, and somehow we ended up going out for coffee, and that was the beginning.”

“You fell in love with an Englisher?” I asked.

“I did indeed.”

A silence slipped into the room. I had been waiting to hear those very words, but still they sounded strange. Love between an Amish girl and an English boy was the stuff of hushed stories after services and behind barns. But they were always distant tales of unseen people.

“Soon John took to learning my schedule, and waiting for me when my shift was over. He was in graduate school, working on his PhD in history. He wanted to know everything about the Plain life. And I wanted to know everything about him and this place that was forbidden to me.”

“Did you tell your parents about him?” I asked.

“Eventually. You’ve never heard such yelling. But that wasn’t as bad as the silence. The silence told me there were no words that could make this right. I would have to choose.”

“Was it hard?”

“The hardest thing I ever did. First I told John I couldn’t see him anymore. But no Amish boy came near to making me feel the way he did. Eventually, I knew that I wanted the life I would have with John, even though it meant giving up my other life.”

“How did you do it?” I asked.

“I went to the person who I thought would understand. Your mother.”

“What did she say?”

“She said that I wouldn’t be her sister anymore.”

A tear slid down my cheek and splashed on my pink shirt.

“Then she said that she couldn’t name her baby after someone who wasn’t Amish.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. Josh’s arm slipped around me, and

I leaned my head on his shoulder. Then I remembered one of the first things Beth had said to me when we met. She named you for me after all.

“I understand now,” I said suddenly, sitting up. “My mother once told me that they wanted my grandfather to approve of my name, and that they had to come up with a few before he finally agreed. Maybe they were trying to get as close to Elizabeth as they could.”

Beth was smiling. “Half a name is better than none.”

Outside, the daylight was seeping away, leaving a blue-black sky. Beth turned on a lamp, casting the living room in an artificial white glow. At home, my mother would be lighting the kerosene lamp now, blowing on it, coaxing the yellow flame.

I looked at Beth. “What was it like? Being shunned.” For a moment, Beth stared at something that wasn’t in the room. But when she spoke, her voice came out smooth as pudding.

“It wasn’t all at once,” she began. “First, my parents spoke to the bishop, and I was excommunicated until the elders could meet about my case. Life was the same for me, but I couldn’t go to services. Then the bishop came to the house and told my parents I was ‘under the bann.’ That’s when things started to change.”

“How did they change?” asked Josh. But I knew. I’d heard stories about people under the bann.

“I couldn’t sit at the table with members of the church, so at mealtime my parents would pull up a small table and I would sit there. Then one day my mother was serving soup, and I held my bowl up to her. She told me I had to put the bowl down on the table, and she would fill it there. Now that I was shunned, she wasn’t allowed to take a dish from my hand or serve food into a dish I was holding.”

Josh shook his head. “That’s so harsh.” I listened in silence.

“Yes,” Beth agreed. “But I was already baptized, so I’d gone back on my promise to follow the church’s rules. If I had asked for forgiveness, the bann would have been lifted and I would have been welcomed back. You see, in a way, it was my choice.”

“How long did you stay at home after the bann?” I asked.

“Just a few weeks,” said Beth. “Miriam and Ike wouldn’t see me. No great loss, but at the time it hurt. Then one day I went to visit my best friend, Emily. Her mother answered the door and told me she was sorry, but I couldn’t come in. I stepped off the porch and looked up to Emily’s window and saw her looking down at me. I could tell she was crying.”

Beth busied herself moving things around the coffee table—a jar of white stones, a book on women authors, a candle. I waited for her to continue.

“That’s when I realized that by staying among them after I had been shunned, I was putting my family and friends at risk. They could be excommunicated if they didn’t follow all the rules of shunning. Then I knew that I couldn’t be a part of both worlds.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I packed my things and John picked me up to take me to his parents’ house. He came in to meet my mother and father, but they refused to talk to him. On his way out the door, he turned around and said, ‘I’m sorry that you didn’t get to know me. I think you would have liked me.’” Beth smiled. “Do you see why I love him?”

Josh was grinning. “He sounds pretty cool.”

Beth nodded. “Then he said, ‘And don’t ever worry about Elizabeth. I’ll always love her.’” Beth was still smiling, but her eyes looked sad.

“What did Grandma and Grandpa say to you?”

“My father didn’t say anything. My mother just said four words: ‘Elizabeth, are you certain?’ When I said yes, she looked down at the floor, and I slipped out. Before John and I left town we drove to your parents’ house so I could say good-bye to your mother. John waited in the car.” Beth’s voice sounded fragile, like someone who was getting over the flu. “I told Becky I was leaving, and she said, ‘It’s probably for the best.’ Then I said that I’d write to her, and I asked if she’d write me back. And she said no.”

I let out the breath I’d been holding. Beth went on. “I started to leave, and when I looked back at Becky, her head was bent and her shoulders were shaking. Then she said, ‘I won’t write you back, but send me letters anyway.’”

I closed my eyes. It was what we were all warned about, and it had happened to my family. I didn’t want to hear another word, and I wanted to know everything. “What happened next?” I asked.

“I wanted to run to her, but I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to leave if I did. When I was just out the door, I called out, ‘I love you,’ and she said, ‘And I you.’ Those were the last words my sister said to me.”

“Did you cry?” I asked.

“Only for about a year,” Beth said with a laugh. “I lived in Chicago with John’s parents while he finished his dissertation, and I did a high school equivalency program. After John and I got married, he got a position at Northwestern and we moved to Evanston.”

“Do you work now?” I asked.

Beth nodded. “I work for a pediatrician, managing the office.” She paused before adding, “We have a nice life. We have lots of friends, and I have a niece and nephew I’m very close with.” Then she looked at me. “And now I have you.”

“Right,” I answered. “Now you have me.”

At that moment I heard the metallic clink of a key in the door, and I glanced at Beth. “Well, it looks like you’re about to meet your uncle John,” she said, jumping up and reaching the front door just as it opened. “John,” she burst out, before he was even inside the house, “you’ll never believe who’s here.”

John stepped in and looked over at Josh and me with a question on his face. We stood up from our places on the couch as he walked into the room. He wore khaki pants and a plaid button-down shirt. His brown hair was flecked with gray, and his eyes had downward creases at the corners, which made him look both tired and kind.

Beth took John’s hand and pulled him toward me. “This is Eliza,” she said. “She’s Becky’s girl. She came and found me.”

John’s face burst into a smile, turning up the lines around his eyes. “Oh, my,” he said. “I don’t know what to say. This is wonderful!” He reached out his hand to shake mine, and then seemed to think better of it. “Well, I’m not going to shake hands with my niece,” he said, holding his arms out and pulling me into a sturdy hug. I didn’t have time to be shy about this instant familiarity. Somehow it felt right to be hugging this man who had promised my grandparents that he would always love their daughter.

“And this is Joshua,” Beth said, as Josh and Uncle John shook hands. “He’s Eliza’s…well, what do you call each other?”

I turned to Josh. He was looking down, fiddling with his cell phone. “We’re good friends,” I said quickly. When I looked at Josh, he seemed relieved. I swallowed back a disappointed feeling before turning to Beth. “When can I see you again?”

“Every day?” she said with a giggle. She wrote a row of numbers on a piece of paper, along with the words Aunt Beth and Uncle John and tore the sheet from the pad. Handing it to me, she said, “I assume you’ve uncovered the mysteries of the telephone.”

I smiled and reached for the pad and wrote down Rachel’s phone number. There was something magical about those two pieces of paper that would connect me with my newfound aunt. I folded the sheet with Beth’s number on it and slid it into the pocket of my jeans. Feeling the crinkle of paper was reassuring.

I walked slowly to the front door, reluctant for the night to end. Uncle John, his face lit up with a smile that was already familiar to me, gave me another hug, and then shook Josh’s hand. “You’re family now,” he told me. I swallowed and nodded.

Beth kissed Josh’s cheek, and then turned to me. “Thank you for finding me,” she said in a choked whisper. I stepped inside of Aunt Beth’s hug, flooded with warmth. When we stepped back from each other, she suddenly reached for my hands, holding them in her own. “One more thing.” She pronounced each word slowly. “My parents. Are they…?” Her words trailed off.

Understanding, I squeezed Beth’s hands. “They’re well,” I said, and saw relief flood her face. “They live with Aunt Miriam and Uncle Ike. Grandpa still works the farm, and Grandma helps Aunt Miriam with the children.”

Beth closed her eyes for a moment. “Thank you, God,” she whispered. She released my hands and leaned against John, who had quietly appeared at her side.

Josh and I stepped together onto Aunt Beth’s porch in the quiet summer darkness. In the car, Josh turned to me. “So, we’re good friends?” he asked, a teasing grin on his face.

I nodded, something stirring inside me. Josh leaned toward me, and our lips found each other. In that moment, I didn’t need a word for what we were. I didn’t need words for anything.