It was official.

She wasn't a saint.

But Jenny had never claimed to be a saint. None of her Amish brethren did, either.

She knew she should be grateful for her family and she was. Her husband's kinner were as much hers as they were his—especially Annie who had been so young when her mother died that she didn't remember her and thought of Jenny as her mamm. And Joshua and Mary treated her as a beloved mother even though they remembered their mother.

But ever since Hannah had announced that she and Chris were going to have a baby, Jenny had felt the unaccustomed and very unwelcome emotion of envy. They'd only been married a year. She and Matthew had been married for three.

It wasn't fair.

Almost immediately, she was ashamed of herself. But she couldn't seem to help it. She wanted a baby of her own. A boppli. She loved that word. It sounded so sweet. So happy and bouncy. So cherished.

Instead, so many months had passed and she'd found out she wasn't pregnant. She wouldn't be carrying a baby close to her heart. She wouldn't share the miracle of creating life with Matthew and watching it come into the world.

Sometimes she wondered if she was showing God she didn't appreciate all He had brought into her life. After all, he'd brought her back here to have a second chance with the man she'd never forgotten. She'd gone through such a valley of despair when she'd been seriously injured, scarred, in her work as a news reporter overseas.

Yet Matthew had seen past that, cherished her, and shared the most precious children in the world with her. He'd said that if they had kinner, that would be wonderful, but if they didn't, then that was God's will and he seemed fine with that. Content, even.

God had even found a way for her to continue to write about the children affected by war she'd grown to care so much for, right here on a farm in the heart of peace and love and simplicity.

She and Matthew had talked about how she felt when she didn't become pregnant. He'd been kind, understanding, and had tried to comfort her. He had been everything she had hoped for about it.

But he wasn't unhappy that they hadn't had children together yet. He reminded her that before they'd gotten married he'd told her he didn't care if her injuries prevented her from having their child. He had three to share with her, he'd said, and if they were meant to have a child together, that God would send one. It was a matter of God's will, he told her. And he was content.

But she wasn't. If she tried not to think about it, every month she got a reminder that she wasn't pregnant.

And this was the way she rewarded Him. With a lack of gratitude, with mental whining. With tears when she found that another month had come and gone and a tiny glimmer of life wasn't beginning inside her.

Sighing, Jenny threw down her pen and got up from the big table that dominated the kitchen. She was tired of working, couldn't seem to stay focused on what she was writing. Best to just get busy doing something else. Idleness wasn't encouraged here.

Not that she'd ever been an idle person. But everyone pulled their weight here, contributed, from small children with chores appropriate to their age and ability to older family members doing what they could after they moved into a dawdi haus, the sort of mother-in-law apartment at the back of the family home.

She glanced at the clock. Half an hour before the kinner got home. Time to do something constructive. If she couldn't write, then she should at least get supper started or redd-up the place a little.

Funny how she'd gotten to where she thought in Pennsylvania Dietsch. If anyone had ever told her that one day she would return to her grandmother's house here in Paradise and marry her girlhood crush, and become Amish, she would never have believed them.

But she had, and here her dreams were coming true, dreams of having a husband, children who loved her, and her writing career as well.

Her life was nearly perfect.

Nearly.

Sighing, she got up. Nearly was a lot better than much of the world had. She knew that better than anyone did after her job as a TV news reporter covering issues involving children in war-torn countries.

Every time her own family gathered around this big wooden kitchen table and she saw how healthy and how happy they were, how they had so much abundance of food and love and security, she made sure she thanked God.

Spring was coming. The cold of the winter had passed and she'd seen little green buds on the trees around the house that morning when she'd said goodbye to her family as they rushed off to work and school. That was probably why her thoughts had turned to new life.

She was only in her early thirties and had years to have a baby, her doctor had told her. Women could have them safely into their late forties, he'd told her.

But though she tried not to worry about internal injuries she'd suffered when she'd been the target of a car bomb overseas during her TV reporting days, there was still that little niggle at the back of her mind each month she didn't get pregnant.

Determined to push those thoughts aside, to remember to be grateful for what she had, she got up, put away her writing things, and changed to mamm mode, as she called it.

Supper went into the oven, Matthew's favorite: ham and scalloped potatoes. She'd endured a lot of teasing the first couple of times she'd made it. Microwaved food had been her specialty before she became an Amish fraa. Now she cooked from scratch with recipes her grandmother handed down to her.

She caught a glimpse of her reflection in the glass of the cupboard door when she opened it. Even though she considered herself plain with her brown hair and gray eyes, her hair center-parted and drawn back under a white kapp, Matthew always made her feel beautiful when he looked at her. He never seemed to see the scar from the bombing that, while faded, was something she could never forgot was there and still found herself raising her hand to cover when someone looked at her.

She was washing her hands when she heard a commotion at the door. The Bontrager children were sweet as can be, but when they came in the door after schul they sounded like a herd of buffalo.

They swarmed into the kitchen and engulfed her in hugs and charmed her into giving them big glasses of milk along with cookies she'd baked earlier that day.

"Three? They're small." asked Annie, giving Jenny her most charming smile.

"Two," Jenny said, smiling at her. "They're big." All of the children looked so like Matthew with their almost white-blond hair and deep blue eyes.

Seven-year-old Annie normally talked so much no one else had a chance to talk for a few minutes at the end of the schul day, but with her mouth stuffed with...