The Doctor's Amish Sweetheart

Chapter 1

Abigail rode at the back of the rented car with a box full of bread in her lap. Another Saturday spent at Lapp's farmers market instead of being home reading her latest novel. A novel she hid from her entire household consisting of her straight-and-narrow Amish parents and the remaining six of her eight brothers and sisters with their families. The house was always full, and Abigail would daydream she was an only child. She shared a room with her twenty-three-year-old sister, Leah, who, like Abigail, was not married yet. Abigail suspected that her sister knew of the book she hid behind the leather dust cover of the limited-edition Ausbund her mom gifted her for her eighteenth birthday just over a year ago. If Leah knew, she never said.

Abigail loved to sing, in church, while doing her chores at home and in the barn; her Ausband was the most precious thing she possessed; she knew every song like the back of her hand. She'll never tell her mother that she only used the collection of hymns in church on Sundays when they began to sing the songs on its pages, and every other day there was a romance novel hiding inside the seam of the brown leather covering. A book Abigail snuck in from the local library she visited whenever she had the chance to break from the group during busy days at the market or trips to town.

Inquisitiveness was her justification for reading the fictional novels, the fact that she was going through Rumspringa- a coming of age within the Amish community where she allowed her curious mind to explore further than what her parents or their culture would prefer- and because she was one of the only young girls in her village who wasn't running after boys or going to parties. Abigail never hosted stay awakes in her room the way Esther had when she was younger or ran amuck like Aganetha had before they got married or embarrassed her parents by getting drunk and passing out at the parties that kids attended at barns around the village like Conrad- Mr Freeman brought him home in the middle of the night- her father was not impressed. She wasn't the child who got picked up by the police for cruising around town with kegs of beer- that was Eli and the twins Benuel and Amos- or kissed a boy like Leah did, she'd been going steady with Caleb for a couple of years now. With the exception of Leah, the rest had gotten baptized into the church and married soon after. Her oldest brother Aaron was the only sibling to make it out of Rumspringa unscathed, and Abigail planned to do the same, well, with the exception of her books. She decided that books would be her vice, and a detrimental vice it was.

Her romance novels were meant to be an enjoyable pastime, a peep into the English civilization- everyone outside the Amish community were considered English- her ancestors relinquished decades ago when they moved to Lancaster for a simpler, more meaningful life. However, the books Abigail stuck her nose into for the last few months have left her with a longing that she believed was the precise reason why she wasn't supposed to read them. The heroine of her books were all educated, strong, and independent, and here she was, riding in an Uber with her mom and older sisters with a trunk full of stuff, heading to the market to sell bread. The men in those stories were fierce, saving lives from crashing helicopters and terrorist bombs, they were nothing like them decent Amish men she'd grown up with; respectable men worthy of high praise, but there was a lacklustre there now for the life she'd eventually have someday.

Abigail knew her duty was to marry soon and have kids young and abundantly the way her mother did before her, and her mothers' mother did before her. It was expected that she find one of those decent men and have children to grow the community, but the fantasies in the novels she'd read made the picture her mom and sisters constantly painted for her of the traditional life since she graduated school at fourteen seem a little mundane now. In fact, Abigail would be lying to herself if she didn't admit that she'd had those doubts about the simple life even before the books. She'd always been the girl with questions no one wanted to answer, the back-chatter at school; the stubborn one.