Rose for Rose: Book Two in the Angels' Mirror Series by Harmony L. Courtney

tried to tell me, and I don’t think I can get back to my own time now if I wanted to. And I don’t know how God could allow this to happen, but I’m here… suddenly, really here. This isn’t a dream, and I’m not crazy… right?”
    Edward began to laugh… in fact, he laughed so hard his stomach hurt.
    The girl stopped crying and glared at him a moment, then seemed to reconsider.
    Now he knew he wasn’t the only one thinking those thoughts after traveling through time on a mirror’s glimmer. Now he knew, but how could he get her to understand he was laughing with relief and not at her.
    For what little good it did him, he tried to recompose himself before speaking.
    “I’m sorry,” he began tentatively; apologetically. “You see, I’m laughing with you… not at you. As Eugenie mentioned… I, too, traveled through that same mirror, but a much… wider distance, in both time and space. I came from France, though I was born in London. And we’ve had to keep it a secret, only a few people. Most wouldn’t understand… so we’ll have to… to do that with you, too…”
    “Might any of her family still be alive who would know her? Or maybe some great niece or nephew who could take her in?” Mark asked as though Rose wasn’t sitting there, her St. Peter’s medal in hand, waiting for the cocoa he brought her to cool.
    Edward chanced a glance in the girl’s direction.
    Tears threatened to yet again spill.
    “Can we talk about that later? Paloma,” he turned to Rose, “that’s my wife,” he explained, “got news of someone looking for… well, I think this is the right Rose, but… we won’t know for sure until someone talks with the man.”
    At this, Rose gave a start, and Mark frowned.
    Gently blowing on his cocoa, Edward listened to the others as they all jumped in at once. “Who is it,” and “Oh…,” and “But we couldn’t…” all leapt to his ears at once as a reply.
    And besides, whatever he could learn about the mirror and how Rose’s family had gotten it, the better… he knew it had been found in California before coming to Oregon… Seal Beach, and then Oceanside. Now he was learning with more certainty that Peter’s story to Daniella that it had been in Massachusetts, most definitely.
    But what of in between, if there were one, and what of beforehand?
    How did it arrive here from le château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and what journey did it travel? Where had little Mary of Modena found the thing, and how old was it? Who made it? And why, oh, why did it change with the storms and cross people through time, as though there were magic attached to it?
    No… not magic, he silently corrected himself. There are angels about it… and not just a golden cherub adorning it, I’m certain. For to him, the mirror had been a miracle. For he and Paloma both.
    With a tentative sip of the cocoa, he wondered how he would reply and what would happen from here on out.
    The mirror had, indeed, taken a second person through time, and he now wondered if more had traveled the breath squeezing, body-whipping, heart-rending whirl of the glass that now stood at Noah’s Café.
     
     
     
     

 
     
     
     
    Eight
    Gloucester, Massachusetts… August 11, 1930
     
    The longer the boys kept looking for their sister, the more terrified they were.
    Poor Michael kept working himself into a silent, brooding frenzy, and Peter and Warren became hysterical a handful of times within the first few hours of their search, even as they continually insisted she had “discerpeared.”
    Steven, the oldest of the boys, at thirteen, did his best to keep Peter and Warren calm, but he was having an even harder time with it himself. And he wasn’t entirely sure what to do with Michael at all, because he and Warren had always been very shy and quiet, in different ways. But now, with this new dilemma, Steven wasn’t sure how to cope with the silent angst he saw in his little brothers’ faces.
    Poor Michael… he was always