Part 3 🌅
“Yes.”
“How long?” Her voice cracked. “How long have you known who I was?”
“Since the bridge. Since I saw his name.”
“The second day.”
“Delia, let me take you home and tell you all of it…”
“No.” She raised her hand. “Not one more word. Not in front of all of them.”
Her eyes were blazing. And wet.
“You sat at my table. You asked me to take my Bible out of the drawer. You told me my half a prayer counted.”
She stepped closer.
“You asked me to trust God. While you let me trust you with half the truth.”
He didn’t defend himself. He took it, full in the chest.
“You’re right.”
“I asked you to teach me to trust God,” she said. “And then you could leave.”
She looked straight into his eyes.
“So leave.” 💔
When she got home, his horse was gone.
The quilt folded at the foot of the ladder. The bridge with one last gap in it.
No hammer. No lantern on the fence line at bedtime.
At supper, she set out two cups before catching herself.
And on the kitchen table, next to her Bible, lay his mother’s worn brown one.
He’d left it.
Near midnight, she opened it.
Two folded papers slid out.
The first was in a neat, square hand.
“Delia, I should’ve told you the first day I knew. Wade gave me the other letter in a boarding house in Sedalia, Missouri, in October of 1891. A freight wagon turned over on him. I sat with him to the end. He talked about you until he couldn’t talk anymore. I looked for you, and didn’t know where to look. I’m sorry. — Gideon”
Her hands went cold.
She unfolded the second paper.
She knew the handwriting before she read a word. That crooked capital D.
“D, if this reaches you, I never made it home. I wasn’t running from you. I was running from the shame in me. Every month I told myself I’d come home when I was a man worth coming home to.”
“I called it providing. It was pride.”
“It wasn’t God who kept me from that gate. It was me. Something kept saying, Go home. And I wouldn’t listen. So don’t you blame God for the cowardice of a man.”
“Forgive me if you can. And don’t wait on the porch for me anymore. — Wade”
Delia laid her head down between the two Bibles.
And wept.
For Wade. Who’d been alive that whole first year. Too ashamed to write. Who died among strangers with her name on his lips.
And for three years of taking the silence of one frightened, proud man…
And calling it the silence of God. 😭
Toward dawn, she turned to the Gospel of John.
“Peace I leave with you. My peace I give unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”
Not peace because things turned out right.
Peace anyhow.
She didn’t feel it yet.
But she underlined it.
That afternoon, the sky went dark as a bruise.
Then lightning struck the barn.
A white flash. Smoke pouring from the hayloft.
And from inside, her old mare Penny screaming in her stall.
Delia ran in.
Fire crawled along the hay above her. The horse reared against her rope.
For one terrible moment, Delia froze.
No Wade. No Gideon. Just a woman alone and fire over her head.
And then she did something she hadn’t done in three years.
She prayed out loud.
“God! I still have questions. I’m still angry. I don’t understand You.”
She was crying and coughing at once.
“But if You’re there, give me courage for the next step. Just the next one.”
No thunder answered.
But the words she’d underlined came back. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.
And her feet moved.
She threw a wet sack over Penny’s head. Cut the rope. Talked low, the way Gideon had.
And led the trembling mare out into the rain.
Then ran back in with a bucket.
She was halfway up the loft ladder, throwing water on the flames, when hoofbeats pounded into the yard.
Gideon came through the door. Soaked.
He’d only gotten as far as the creek ford two miles down. And sat there all night. Unable to ride on.
He’d seen where the lightning hit.
He didn’t take her bucket.
He grabbed a pitchfork.
“Keep the water coming. I’ll get the burning hay out the loft door.”
Together, they fought it until the last ember died. 🔥
Afterward, they stood in the doorway, soaked, breathing hard.
“You came back,” she said.
“I saw where the lightning hit.”
“I wasn’t waiting for you.”
“I know. I saw you on that ladder.”
“I prayed out loud,” she said quietly. “I told Him I was still angry.”
Gideon nodded slowly. “Good. He can hold that.”
Days later, he came to her gate. Hat in hand. Like the very first day.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.
“Because the first thing you asked of me was to help you trust God again. I was afraid the truth would make you believe He’d abandoned you all over again.”
He looked straight at her.
“I told myself it was wisdom to wait. But I was afraid. And I called my fear wisdom. That was wrong, Delia. It wasn’t mine to decide what you could carry.”
Then he told her about Sedalia.
How Wade could calm a stubborn mule better than any man on the line. How he whistled hymns while he greased the axles.
How every single month he said, Next month, I’ll go home.
“I believe you,” Delia said at last, tears running down her face. “But understanding someone isn’t the same as trusting them. That part will take time.”
“Then I’ll give it time.” 🥹
That Sunday, Delia walked into church for the first time in two years.
After the last hymn, Reverend Pike came down the aisle.
And in front of his whole congregation, the old man lowered his head.
“You came to me wounded, Delia. And I handed you an answer because I didn’t have the courage to sit in the question with you. I was wrong. I’m sorry.”
She took his hand.
At the foot of the bridge, she set a small stone with four words she chose herself.
He meant to come home.
That August, she finished the bridge herself.
Drove in the last nail.
Walked across. And back again.
And laughed.
Gideon came every Sunday after that. Hat in hand. Never past dark.
“Honey,” Callie said one afternoon, watching him walk up the road with a fistful of wildflowers, “that man looks at you like you hung the moon.”
One cold winter night on the porch, Delia finally asked.
“You said once it was a long story. Why you never married.”
“After Mama died, I found a verse she’d marked. Man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.”
He looked at his coffee.
“I was lonesome, Delia. Plenty lonesome. But I didn’t want to marry just because I was afraid of an empty house. So I prayed. Lord, if marriage is ever meant for me, let me recognize a woman by the kind of heart You see.”
“I wanted a woman with mercy in her. Courage. Truth. And a real hunger to know God. Even if she was hurting.”
Delia looked down. “That doesn’t sound much like me.”
“It sounds exactly like the woman I’ve watched fight her way back to Him.” ❤️
He asked her that April.
One year to the month after he first stopped at her gate.
Standing on the finished bridge. The creek running high beneath them. Redbuds blooming on the bank.
He took off his hat.
“You taught me something about this bridge. A life doesn’t have to be built in a day. It goes up one board at a time.”
His voice shook.
“If you’ll let me, Delia, I’d like to build the rest of mine beside you.”
She didn’t make him wait long.
They married that June. Daisies in jars. Sunlight through tall church windows.
Callie cried from the first hymn to the last.
And it was Reverend Pike who married them.
Years later, if you drove past that white farmhouse, you’d hear it before you saw it.
A hammer in the barn. A kettle on the stove.
And two children running barefoot across the bridge. Past a small stone with a man’s name on it. A man their mother taught them to speak of kindly.
And inside, you might find Delia across the table from some young woman in a worn black dress.
A widow. Or a wife whose husband went west and never wrote.
Delia wouldn’t tell her everything happens for a reason.
She’d pour two cups of strong coffee. And listen.
And when the time was right, she’d open her Bible, full of pencil lines now.
“I don’t have all the answers,” she’d say softly. “But I can show you where I started asking.”
That black Bible still sits open on the table. Between the salt and the lamp.
Not because every question was answered.
But because she’s no longer afraid to bring them. 🌄
✨ Your questions don’t frighten God. A wounded faith is still faith. And waiting is not the same as being forgotten. Not one sparrow falls without Him seeing, and you are worth more than many sparrows.
💬 Have you ever felt forgotten while waiting on a prayer? Tell me in the comments. You’re not alone.
(Note: This story is entirely fictional and created for entertainment purposes only. It does not represent any organization or individual, nor does it encourage inappropriate behavior. Content is created with the support of artificial intelligence.)