The bishop looked surprised. “Well, Katie, what for?”

She could not even raise her eyes to the older man. “Please,” she murmured, then swallowed hard.

The deacon and the bishop looked at each other, and Ephram nodded. The trembling, submissive creature beside me was nothing like the girl who’d looked me in the eye and told me there was no baby. She was nothing like the girl who’d spoken to me minutes before about what was visible to one person not being crystal clear to another. But she did bear a striking resemblance to the child I’d seen in court the moment I first arrived, the child who had been ready to let the legal system steamroll her rather than mount a defense.

“It’s like this,” Ephram said uncomfortably. “We know how hard things are, right now, and only bound to be getting more tangled. But there was a baby, Katie, and you being not married . . . well, you need to come to church, and make your things right.”

It was slight, but Katie inclined her head.

With a nod to me, the two men struck off across the field again. It took a full thirty seconds for Katie to get control of herself, and when she did, her face was as pale as a new moon. “What was that about?” I asked.

“They want me to confess to my sin.”

“What sin?”

“Having a baby out of wedlock.” She started walking, and I hurried to keep up with her.

“What will you do?”

“Confess,” Katie said quietly. “What else can I do?”

Surprised, I turned and blocked her path. “You could start by telling them what you told me. That you didn’t have a baby.”

Her eyes filled with tears. “I couldn’t tell them that; I couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

Katie shook her head, her cheeks bright. She ran into the waving sea of corn.

“Why not?” I yelled after her, my frustration rooting me to the ground.

The men who brought the inverter set it up for me in the barn. Attached to the generator beside the calving pen, it gave me a lovely view of the police tape still securing the crime scene, just in case I needed any inspiration to fight Katie’s charges. Shortly after four o’clock I carried my files and my laptop out to the barn and began to act like a lawyer.

Levi, Samuel, and Aaron were milking the cows at their stanchions. Levi seemed resigned to the Amish equivalent of scut work-shoveling manure, scooping out grain-while the two older men wiped down the udders of the cows with what seemed to be the pages of a telephone book, and then hooked them up in pairs to a suction pump powered by the same generator that was indirectly running my computer. From time to time, Aaron would carry the container into the milk room and pour it into the bulk tank with an audible splash.

I watched them for a while, taken by their graceful routine and the kindness of their hands as they stroked the side of a cow’s belly or scratched behind her ears. Smiling, I gingerly plugged in my laptop, made a quick and fervent prayer that this wouldn’t surge and destroy my hard drive, and booted it up.

The screen rolled open in a wash of color, spotted with icons and toolbars. My screen saver came next, a computer graphic of sharks at the bottom of the ocean. I reached for one of the manila files I’d received from the prosecutor and spread it open on the hay. Leafing through its contents, I tried to formulate in my mind a motion for services other than counsel.

When I glanced up, Levi was gaping at the laptop from across the barn, his shovel propped forgotten at his side until Samuel walked over and cuffed him. But then Samuel looked himself, eyes widening at the burst of color and the realism of the sharks. His hand twitched, as if he was trying hard not to reach out and touch what he saw.

Aaron Fisher never even turned his head.

A cow bawled at the far end of the stanchions. The sweet hay and even sweeter feed tickled the inside of my nose. The tug-suck, tug-suck of the milking pump became a backbeat. Closing out this world, I focused and began to type.

The broad beam of light swept over her legs, then arched up the wall and the ceiling before repeating the circuit all over again. Katie came up on her elbows, heart pounding. Ellie was still asleep; that was a good thing. She crawled out of bed and knelt at the window. At first she could see nothing; then Samuel removed his hat and the moon caught the crown of his bright hair. Taking a deep breath, Katie slipped into her clothes and hurried out to meet him.

He was waiting with the flashlight, which he turned off the minute he saw her framed in the doorway. Once Katie walked outside, he caught her in his arms and pressed his lips against hers, hard. It made Katie freeze-he’d never moved this fast before-and she wedged her hands up between them to set her distance. “Samuel!” she said, and immediately he stepped back.

“I’m sorry,” Samuel murmured. “I am. It’s just that I feel like you’re slipping away.”

Katie lifted her eyes. She knew Samuel’s face as well as her own; they’d grown up as family, as friends. He’d chased her into a tree once when she was eleven. He’d kissed her for the first time when she was sixteen, behind Joseph Yoder’s calf shed. On the small of her back, she felt Samuel’s hands move restlessly.

Sometimes when she pictured her life, it was like the telephone poles that marched along the length of Route 340-year after year after year, stretching out all the way to the horizon. And when she saw herself like that, it was always with Samuel standing beside her. He was everything that was right for her; everything that was expected of her. He was her safety net. The thing was, most Plain folks never lifted their faces from the straight and narrow ground, to know that high above was the most wondrous tightrope you could ever have the chance to walk.

Samuel tipped his forehead against Katie’s. She could feel his breath, his words, falling onto her, and she opened her lips to receive them. “That baby wasn’t yours,” he said urgently.

“No,” she whispered.

He tilted his face so that their mouths came together, wide and sweet as the sea. Their kiss tasted of salt, and Katie knew there were tears on both of their cheeks, but she did not recall which of them had passed the sorrow to the other. She opened herself to Samuel as she had never done before, understanding that this was a debt he had come to collect.

Then Samuel drew away from her and kissed her eyelids. He held her face between his hands and murmured, “I’ve sinned.”

She raised her palms to cover his. “You haven’t,” she insisted.

“Yes. Let me finish.” Samuel swallowed. “That baby. That baby, it wasn’t ours.” He gathered Katie closer, burying his face in her hair. “It wasn’t ours, Katie. But I have been wishing it was.”

“Have you ever touched one?”

Adam looked up from the desk, smiling at the sight of Katie bent over one of his logbooks. “Yeah,” he said. “Well, sort of. You can’t grab them, you just sort of feel them come over you.”

“Like a wind?”

Adam set down his pen. “More like a shiver.”

Katie nodded, and very seriously turned back to her reading. This was the second time she’d visited Jacob this week-an unprecedented occurrence, appar ently-and she’d scheduled the visit on a day when she knew that Jacob was working at the college until the afternoon. When Adam sat down beside her, Katie smiled. “Tell me what it was like.”

“I was at an old hotel in Nantucket. I woke up in the middle of the night and found a woman looking out the window. She was wearing an old-fashioned dress, and the air was filled with this perfume-a scent I’d never smelled before, or since. I sat up and asked who she was, but she didn’t answer. And then I realized that I could see the windowsill and the wooden mullions right through her body. She completely ignored me, then walked right past the window, through me. It felt . . . chilly. Made the hair rise on the back of my neck.”