CHAPTER 24: THE CHURCH SECRETARY
The church secretary answered their second letter shortly after they reached a safer community.
Her name was Hannah Brooks, and she remembered Miriam Reed as a skilled seamstress who had helped newcomers find paid work.
Miriam had moved again after an illness two winters earlier.
Hannah believed she was living with friends near a small town farther north.
She enclosed a forwarding address but warned that the family had changed residences recently.
Josiah wrote immediately.
He described Ruth, Mercy, and their freedom papers without revealing details that could endanger strangers who had assisted them.
He told Miriam that Ruth still remembered the songs she sang while mending clothes.
He wrote that Mercy had inherited her stubborn way of asking questions.
Then he added a line that took him an hour to compose.
“We never stopped looking for the truth about you,” he wrote.
Ruth read the letter before it was mailed.
She asked him to include a question only their mother could answer.
As children, Miriam had hidden a carved blue button inside a cupboard and told them it belonged to a coat from her own childhood.
Ruth asked where the button had come from.
Josiah added the question and sealed the envelope.
While they waited, he found paid work tending horses at a modest livery stable.
The owner wanted proof of his skill and paid him less than the other hands at first.
Josiah negotiated, learned the rates, and eventually secured fairer wages.
Ruth began sewing for local families while arranging lessons for Mercy.
Their days were difficult and their savings small.
Still, each evening they discussed what to do next without asking permission from Oakwood.
The ordinary right to plan became a source of joy neither had expected to feel so strongly.
CHAPTER 25: THE ANSWER IN BLUE
A letter arrived on a rainy afternoon when Josiah was repairing a saddle.
Ruth ran from the lodging house carrying the envelope beneath her shawl.
The handwriting was uneven, and neither sibling recognized it.
Josiah opened the letter carefully to avoid tearing the paper.
The writer began by saying she was Miriam Reed and had struggled to believe that her children were truly writing to her.
She described the blue button as a gift from her father, who had carved it from a piece of painted wood.
She said she had kept it through moves and punishments because it was the only object remaining from her childhood.
Ruth covered her mouth.
Josiah continued reading until the words blurred.
Miriam explained that she had obtained freedom through the late aunt’s trust but had been prevented from contacting her children by fear,
distance, and intercepted messages.
She had not known whether either child remained at Oakwood.
She had been ill but was recovering with a family that treated her kindly.
She asked whether they could travel safely and whether Mercy would want to meet her.
Josiah passed the letter to Ruth.
Ruth read it aloud slowly so Mercy could hear her grandmother’s words.
Mercy asked whether they would find the blue button.
Ruth laughed through tears and said they would ask to see it.
The reply did not return the six years they had lost.
It did give those years a living voice at the far end of the road.
Josiah wrote back that they would come as soon as travel could be arranged.
He told Miriam that neither he nor Ruth expected her to explain away every absence.
They wanted to sit with her, hear her story, and decide their future together.
The letter went out the next morning.
For once, waiting felt less like helplessness and more like the distance between a promise and its fulfillment.
