Endless Chain

With the warmth and comfort of a handmade quilt, Endless Chain explores the intricate patterns of family and community, and the threads that bind them together

Sam Kinkade is finally feeling at home as a minister in rural Toms Brook, Virginia, content with his life and Shenandoah Valley congregation. But his plans to welcome the area’s growing Hispanic community are being met with resistance. Fortunately, when the church-run community center is threatened, a stranger named Elisa Martinez walks through his door and Sam realizes he has found a woman capable of building bridges.

Elisa isn’t looking to make connections. She has come to Toms Brook to hide. But despite her fears of discovery she is enchanted by the beautiful work and the friendship offered by the women who invite her to join their quilting circle. And even though she fears the consequences for both of them, she finds herself powerfully drawn to Sam, and to a generations-old love story rooted in the town’s past.

Will she and Sam repeat the past, or can they find the love and the freedom they seek at last?

Endless Chain

Emilie Richards

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

EXCERPT FROM LOVER'S KNOT

Chapter One

Shenandoah Community Church Wednesday Morning Quilting

Bee and Social Gathering—August 6th

The meeting was called to order at 9:00 a.m. in the quilters’ beehive. Helen Henry suggested (once again) that we change the name of our group to SCC Bee and be done with it. She insists that reading the heading of the minutes takes most of our business session. To please Helen, who lacks patience, we agreed to drop “Morning” from the written notes, beginning next week.

Cathy Adams brought a quilt top for show-and-tell in the Chinese Coin pattern, using oriental prints. (Peony Greenway noted politely that Cathy paid too much for them.) We will begin quilting the top after Labor Day, when we hope to be finished with a lap quilt of appliqued Autumn Leaves, which will be a gift for Martha Wisner.

Helen agreed to stay after the bee and help Cathy square up her quilt top so that the finished product won’t look like it was quilted by “drunken sailors.” Please note the quotation marks. I am only the scribe.

Kate Brogan brought her two youngest children as guests. After Rory jumped on Cathy’s quilt top, Chinese Coins will need all the help Helen can give it. The meeting was adjourned soon after, and those bag lunches that survived Rory’s karate demonstrations were shared among the quilters who remained.

Sincerely,

Dovey K. Lanning, recording secretary

“SO...” ANNA MAYHEW looked up from one of her tiny, even stitches and wiggled her eyebrows to signal what was to come. “I hear Chris-tine Flet-cher—” she punched all the syllables “—is coming for the fundraiser tonight. What do you suppose she’ll wear to the party?”

“The heck with what she wears,” Dovey Lanning said. “Let’s talk about where she’s going to sleep.”

“There is a child under the quilt frame.” For the life of her, Helen Henry couldn’t figure out why she had to remind the others. At the moment little Rory Brogan was banging the floor at her feet with a picture book of talking bunnies that his mother had given him to read. Kate Brogan was nothing if not an optimist.

“Rory!” Kate, an attractive thirty-something brunette, vacated her chair and dragged her son out from under the frame. “Go outside and play on the slide. Now.”

Rory protested. “I was killing germs. There are a million germs under there!”

“He just learned about germs in preschool camp,” Kate apologized. “Knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

“These were ninja germs!” Rory insisted.

“I believe I saw those very same ninja germs escaping into the play yard,” Anna told him. “And if you don’t stop them there, they might get all the way to the road.”

Rory’s eyes brightened. He had shiny dark hair and eyes that matched. He was a wiry child, one part willfulness, two parts energy, three parts resolve. Today he was wearing a white “gi” and the yellow belt he had earned the previous week in his Tai Kwon Do class.

Helen didn’t like children, of course. But she had to admit that this one had spunk.

The silence thrummed once Rory had left for his search-and-destroy mission, and everyone inhaled it gratefully. In the hour since their short business meeting, there had been precious little silence. The “Beehive” in the walkout basement was cramped. Once it had been the nursery, before the church’s expanding baby population had been moved into a brand-new wing. Several months ago the quilters had commandeered the tiny room for their own use. It was just wide enough for a quilting frame and several comfortable pieces of furniture along the wall, but it was filled with light from windows overlooking a fenced-in play yard and an expansive parking lot. And it was all theirs.