Page 297 of Taken Away

She sighed.

“Oh, Annie.”

There was no anger in it.

She had been angry once. Wounded. Ashamed.

But anger had burned away.

What remained was sorrow and hope.

She had watched Anne chase Harold with the same relentless determination she brought to everything she wanted. By the time Harold found his way home again, all three of them had been changed.

Mabel leaned back in Harold’s chair and closed her eyes.

She imagined a quieter room.

Aubrey with the Bible open in front of her.

Anne seeing Harold’s handwriting.

Anne seeing the photograph.

Anne finally understanding that Mabel had never wanted to steal her child.

She remembered Anne at sixteen, laughing barefoot in the creek.

Anne at twenty, dazzling enough to turn every head.

Mabel missed that Anne.

Her sister.

Not the polished woman who looked at Blackwood like it had ruined her.

Not the mother who had kept Aubrey away because love had become too tangled with punishment.

Her Annie.

Mabel wiped at her cheek.

“I still want you back too,” she whispered.

Mabel carefully slid the photograph back between the pages of the Bible.

The evening light shifted across Harold’s desk, touching the photograph, the Bible, the signed papers, Mabel’s hand.

She felt almost light.

Not because the past could be undone.

It could not.

But because something might still be mended.

A breeze moved through the vines.

Mabel pressed one hand to the glass and smiled.