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She saw it with Abilene. She heard it from Adam. And she would never forget the way Larissa went from regal to submissive within a single heartbeat when her husband picked her up today.
She shivered, recalling Larissa’s downcast eyes and the way she followed his command without objection. Annalise could never live like that. It wasn’t in her blood and she feared—if she changed—her blood would as well. She didn’t want to become some Stepford puppet.
She had so many questions and couldn’t help the creeping suspicions that kept cropping up. She’d asked Adam about the basics, garlic, mirrors, crucifixes... All the novels were wrong. None of that stuff had any power over them. They didn’t have mirrors on the walls because they were Amish, not because of any vampire folklore.
With so many differences between his culture and hers, discerning which differences were due to their faith and which were due to their biology could be confusing. But the combination of immortality and Amish? Brilliant. They truly were safe here.
The screen door creaked. “Anna? Are you sure you won’t eat?” Grace’s soft-spoken question proved, once again, that they we’re not the evil creatures so many assumed, sketched in fictional worlds where coffins and castles were king.
“No, thank you.” She couldn’t eat. Her head was too—
“A little food will clarify your thoughts.”
Please get out of my head...
Dropping her gaze with a look of contrition on her face, Grace nodded and returned inside the house. Annalise sensed Adam’s concern the moment Grace must have relayed that she’d been turned down.
Lost in a maze of questions, she went back to rocking and thinking—no closer to deciding than she’d been days ago, when he brought her here. She simply couldn’t picture what her life would look like if she agreed to this.
Would they actually be a married couple, or would it be a marriage of convenience to save his life? Again, her hand went to the back of her neck. Adam would never settle for less than an actual marriage.
He was very old fashioned in his thinking as well as his lifestyle. But that’s what made him special. He took his position very seriously and saw his duty to protect her as a great honor. True, he had a way of exaggerating the danger in her world. There hadn’t been any danger before she met him.
Her mind always went back to the same place. But had she known him when her mother had been suffering... Would he have protected her then? Somehow saved her battered heart? Maybe he could have helped her mother fight the cancer even though he said it didn’t work that way.
She was reaching. But he would have protected her. He would have been there with her, beside her, helping her make all the tough decisions and holding her when she just couldn’t keep herself together anymore. Looking back, it made her sad she hadn’t met him yet.
Those were the worst months of her life. Every day she battled the guilt of wondering when it would end, while also begging for one more day. She knew the second the doctors told them it was terminal that her life would never be the same.
Some daughters fought with their moms over curfews and dating. Annalise never had that sort of relationship with her mother. They were more like friends than parent and child. And when she died, a piece of Annalise died with her.
Her father, a man she’d never met face to face, had only just begun to acknowledge her presence. After the funeral, Annalise had reached out to him, hoping to find ... something. But he didn’t want the connection she so desperately needed at the time.
He had a family, and a wife of over thirty-five years. None of them knew about the sophomore he’d fooled around with twenty-three years ago. And her mother kept her promise not to tell of the married man who got her pregnant.
But when the will was read and the keys to the safety deposit box were turned over, all those missing puzzle pieces fell into place, painting a new picture of family Annalise didn’t recognize.
She resisted the urge to look for a man who never looked for her, but that only lasted so long. One quick Internet search and there was her father—still married and tenured at the school where he’d met her mother.
A few months of social media stalking, and she mustered the courage to reach out to him in a private message. His responses were slow and measured. But he seemed curious. He liked asking about her schooling and grades.
She’d been the one to suggest they meet. At first, he delayed an encounter, but after several requests, he finally agreed. The first time he stood her up had been due to a flat tire—supposedly. The second time it was a stomach bug. After that, the excuses got worse. And the last time he hadn’t bothered to make one at all.
