ONE YEAR LATER
“Gently, Pandy girl,” Lottie said as she placed the swaddled baby in a seated Pandy’s waiting arms. “You must support his head and take care not to move, or you will disturb him.”
“Oh, Mama,” Pandy said, her voice hushed. “Albert’s hands is so small.”
“His handsaresmall,” Lottie corrected, smiling down at the two children who, though they had not been born of her womb, were hers.
It had taken time to earn that place in Pandy’s eyes and in her heart, but slowly, surely, they had bonded. And when one day, Pandy had burst into tears over a skinned knee after she’d been skipping on the garden’s gravel path and had rushed to Lottie for comfort, calling her Mama for the first time, Lottie herself had been moved to tears.
“Are small,” Pandy repeated, gazing in wonder at her new brother. “He’s sleeping.”
A recent arrival at the orphanage, Albert had been left by a young mother who was already overburdened with too many mouths to feed. Lottie had been taking tea with the orphanage director, Mr. Slatkin, when the baby had arrived. And somethingwithin her had simply known that she was meant to be his mother.
“Babies sleep a great deal when they are small,” Lottie told Pandy. “They need their strength to grow big.”
“Big like me,” Pandy said, puffing up her shoulders importantly.
“Big like you,” Lottie agreed, smiling as she straightened at last, aware she had been hovering over little Albert.
The way Pandy was positioned on the settee, a pillow at her side, meant that the baby was in no danger of sliding from his sister’s lap. As Lottie watched the two of them together, she had to blink furiously to clear away the prickle of tears.
“I’m biggerer ’n Jane,” Pandy declared.
“You ain’t,” declared her five-year-old sister as she dashed into the room, Cat trailing happily at her heels.
Behind her came Brandon, grinning at the antics of their other daughter, whom they had also brought home from the orphanage. She and Pandy had made fast friends, and they shared a true sisterly bond that extended to rivalries, arguing, and the occasional bit of naughty antics, from pepper on each other’s pillows to tying together the laces of each other’s boots.
“I’m older’n you,” Pandy pointed out quietly, displaying a remarkable restraint Lottie hadn’t been certain the spirited child possessed. “That means I’m biggerer.”
Jane harrumphed—likely the result of spending too much time with Brandon’s grandmother—and flounced onto the settee at Pandy’s side. “I’m tallerer.”
“I’m the tallerest,” Pandy countered.
Albert shifted, beginning to make sounds of protest.
“Hush, you two,” Brandon cautioned tenderly. “You’re disturbing your brother. You can argue over which of you is tallest later.”
Cat settled on the carpet at the foot of the settee, curling up with a contented sigh. With two girls to play chase-chase with her, Cat now no longer had quite the surfeit of enthusiasm she had a year ago. Lottie bent and gave the spaniel’s silken head a fond scratch as Brandon reached her, placing an arm around her waist and pulling her into his side.
“I’ve missed you,” he murmured, pressing a chaste kiss to her cheek for the benefit of the children.
“You were only gone in the gardens with Jane and Cat for one quarter hour,” she said, grinning at her handsome husband, love for him beating strong and firm in her heart.
“It felt like an eternity without you.” He winked.
“What’s a turnity?” Jane asked.
“It’s a pudding, silly,” Pandy answered before either Lottie or Brandon could. “And not a very good one, neither.”
They shared an amused glance.
“Eternity is something without end,” Brandon said then, holding her gaze. “Like the love I have for your mama and for all of you, my family.”
And her heart, already bursting with an abundance of love, filled just a bit more.
One year later
Something miraculous had happened.
