The Amish Girl Who Stayed: A Clean Romance of Choosing Home (Stonebridge Book 5)

There is a bus ticket in the tin on the shelf, expired, filed with the school receipts. Lena Yoder has twice come close to using one, and twice she has not. She teaches the one-room school. Fourteen children walk between one and three miles in weather that cannot decide, and the stove she cleaned in November still pushes smoke back into the room every time the wind comes off the river. Then the stone bridge fails its inspection, and Stonebridge has to choose. The county will happily put a new road through - a road that opens the district to everything on the other side of it. Or the district pays for the bridge itself, which is money nobody has. Tom Carrick is the county's bridge inspector, an Englischer who takes the trouble to learn how her name is actually said. He is decent, he is interested, and he keeps his distance - and Lena's answer to him never once wavers. Mahlon Stoltzfus is the carpenter who thinks the arch can be carried, and who draws it full-size on ply in carpenter's pencil to prove it. Staying was never something Lena chose. It was only something that kept not happening - until the road is open, the map is in somebody else's hands, and she has to decide it out loud. A closed-door Amish romance about a failing bridge, a road that would open a closed district, and the difference between staying and choosing to stay. Faith, community and a hard-won happy ending. The final book of the series. Book 5 of Stonebridge Amish. Each book follows a new couple and can be read on its own.