A Promise For All Time by Paula Quinn EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Paula Quinn
- Language: English
- Genre: Renaissance Historical Romance
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 7.6 MB
- Price: Free
Manhattan, NY
2022
“My allergies are all about to kick in.” Mercy Blagden fanned away
dust motes and traces of cobwebs before her face and was thankful, at least,
for the daylight streaming in through the cracks of the boarded up windows.
Still, she needed the light from her phone to help her see her way around
the abandoned orphanage in Bloomingburg, New York, where she had
grown up.
For a moment Mercy let the memories of her childhood in this place
wash over her. They were neither good, nor bad memories. They simply
were. Just like her. In the columned light she could see Sister Joseph Ann
sitting in a chair reading from a book to the twelve children who lived there.
Smells that were no longer real filled Mercy’s nostrils: fresh bread, old
books, Sister Dominique’s special mac and cheese, the scent of fresh roses
coming from Sister Tess’s habit when she returned from one of her visits to
her family in England.
Mercy could hear the sound of children’s laughter
running around the spacious old Victorian house as if they were there now.
“I wish I had known some of them better,” she told the echoes around
her. She didn’t imagine anyone could hear her. She was alone, after all. She
wasn’t daft. “What do the doctors know about me?” she asked. “Nothing is
right.”
She wasn’t sure sometimes if she was speaking to herself or someone
who wasn’t there, but should be. Like a twin who tragically died at birth,
someone she should be sharing her life with. It was a habit that had made
her life very difficult since she was four. But, as she had told countless
therapists over the years, she’d rather talk to herself than to anyone else.
She remembered herself going up these same stairs to her room to be
alone. She didn’t like most of the other children. They teased her about the
ugly scar marring her face from her temple to under her lower lip, given to
her by the thief who had broken into their NYC apartment when she was
three and killed her mother and stabbed Mercy in her big-girl bed. Later,
she became quiet and secretive around others, untrusting and detached. She
became her own best friend, pointing things out out loud, audibly answering
questions she’d asked herself in her mind, even giggling on a few occasions
as if she heard jokes privy to her ears alone. Her “personality disorder” kept
her from getting adopted.
Sister Tess seemed to take a special interest in Mercy’s well-being.
When she wasn’t off visiting other orphanages, she was extra kind to
Mercy, giving her extra helpings of food—though Mercy didn’t eat it most
of the time, and chocolate—when it was forbidden except for one’s
birthday. When Mercy was twelve, Sister Tess mentioned that she had
changed from being an extraverted toddler, even after she lost her mother
and was stabbed, to a child who barely spoke and rarely smiled when she
was around others. The doctors all blamed the trauma of violence for her
disorder. But even though she didn’t know about what happened to Mercy
in the attic, Sister Tess believed something else had caused the change in
her.
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