Freedom's Ring Read online

  Advance Praise for Freedom’s Ring

  “A stunning debut from an ACFW award winner, Freedom’s Ring is a powerful journey into past and present that will inspire, encourage, and uplift. Prepare to indulge in this masterful love story of God and country that both haunts and heals long after the last page.”

  JULIE LESSMAN

  award-winning author of the Daughters of Boston, Winds of Change, and Heart of San Francisco series

  “Heidi Chiavaroli’s poignant exploration of the deeply broken and very human hearts of two Boston women, separated by centuries but connected through a mysterious gold signet ring, captured my heart and fired my imagination. Freedom’s Ring paints a stunning portrait of the healing power of love and forgiveness through divine strength. Days after reading, I’m still caught up in the rich historical detail, in the intrigue and mystery that brought three centuries together, and still pondering the difficult choices made by each character. Beautifully written, a riveting debut novel.”

  CATHY GOHLKE

  Christy Award–winning author of Secrets She Kept and Saving Amelie

  “In Freedom’s Ring, Heidi Chiavaroli masterfully weaves together a moving story about the complexity of love and forgiveness, a novel rich with truth that transcends the barrier of time. Her writing captured me from page one, the strength of her words reflecting the journey of her main characters—past and present—as they sought courage to overcome their fears. A brilliant debut!”

  MELANIE DOBSON

  award-winning author of Chateau of Secrets and Catching the Wind

  “Heidi has penned an intriguing tale of two women separated by time connected through their search for a strength they desperately need. History and the present are so deftly entwined, readers will be turning pages to keep up with the story tugging on their hearts.”

  MELISSA JAGEARS

  author of A Heart Most Certain

  “In her debut novel, Freedom’s Ring, Heidi Chiavaroli skillfully blends two equally compelling stories, set in two different eras. With fresh writing and a richness of detail, the author does a brilliant job of drawing us into each world. From courage in the face of tragedy to the healing power of forgiveness, this book will leave you with a wonderful message of faith, hope, and second chances.”

  SUSAN ANNE MASON

  award-winning author of the Courage to Dream series

  Visit Tyndale online at www.tyndale.com.

  Visit Heidi Chiavaroli at heidichiavaroli.com.

  TYNDALE and Tyndale’s quill logo are registered trademarks of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

  Freedom’s Ring

  Copyright © 2017 by Heidi Chiavaroli. All rights reserved.

  Cover photograph of woman copyright © Lee Avison/Trevillion Images. All rights reserved.

  Cover photograph of flag copyright © Nic Taylor/iStockphoto. All rights reserved.

  Cover illustration of frame copyright © cutelittlethings/Adobe Stock. All rights reserved.

  Cover photograph of gold background copyright © Pablo G/Adobe Stock. All rights reserved.

  Cover photograph of Old State House copyright © Chensiyuan/Wikimedia.com. All rights reserved.

  Designed by Nicole Grimes

  Edited by Caleb Sjogren

  Published in association with the literary agency of Natasha Kern Literary Agency, Inc., P.O. Box 1069, White Salmon, WA 98672.

  Freedom’s Ring is a work of fiction. Where real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales appear, they are used fictitiously. All other elements of the novel are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Tyndale House Publishers at [email protected] or call 800-323-9400.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Chiavaroli, Heidi, author.

  Title: Freedom’s ring / Heidi Chiavaroli.

  Description: Carol Stream, Illinois : Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017001854 | ISBN 9781496423122 (sc)

  Subjects: LCSH: Victims of terrorism—Fiction. | Boston Marathon Bombing,

  Boston, Mass., 2013—Fiction. | War victims—Fiction. | Boston Massacre,

  1770—Fiction. | Loss (Psychology)—Fiction. | Faith—Fiction. | GSAFD:

  Christian fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3603.H542 F74 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017001854

  ISBN 978-1-4964-2313-9 (ePub); ISBN 978-1-4964-2315-3 (Kindle); ISBN 978-1-4964-2314-6 (Apple)

  Build: 2017-07-20 15:42:10

  To Daniel,

  my husband, hero, and best friend

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue: Anaya

  Chapter 1: Anaya

  Chapter 2: Liberty

  Chapter 3: Anaya

  Chapter 4: Liberty

  Chapter 5: Anaya

  Chapter 6: Liberty

  Chapter 7: Anaya

  Chapter 8: Liberty

  Chapter 9: Anaya

  Chapter 10: Liberty

  Chapter 11: Anaya

  Chapter 12: Liberty

  Chapter 13: Anaya

  Chapter 14: Liberty

  Chapter 15: Anaya

  Chapter 16: Liberty

  Chapter 17: Anaya

  Chapter 18: Liberty

  Chapter 19: Anaya

  Chapter 20: Liberty

  Chapter 21: Anaya

  Chapter 22: Liberty

  Chapter 23: Anaya

  Chapter 24: Liberty

  Chapter 25: Anaya

  Chapter 26: Liberty

  Chapter 27: Anaya

  Chapter 28: Liberty

  Chapter 29: Anaya

  Chapter 30: Liberty

  Chapter 31: Anaya

  Chapter 32: Liberty

  Chapter 33: Anaya

  Chapter 34: Liberty

  Chapter 35: Anaya

  Chapter 36: Liberty

  Chapter 37: Anaya

  Chapter 38: Liberty

  Chapter 39: Anaya

  Epilogue: Anaya

  Historical Note

  About the Author

  Discussion Questions

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  IN THINKING ABOUT the people who have supported me in this crazy writing journey, I am overcome with gratitude for all of your love and support.

  Thank you to my agent, Natasha Kern, for believing in this book, and for your encouragement and patience with my many newbie author questions. I’d be lost without you.

  Thank you to all the wonderful people at Tyndale. Jan Stob, thank you for taking this book on, for smoothing the many aspects of the publication road for me, and for extending grace during our brainstorming sessions. You are awesome. Caleb Sjogren, you’ve done so much to make this book all it could be. I’m so appreciative of your brilliant insight. Thank you for helping me dig deeper into these characters and for your positive spirit of encouragement. I love working with you. Nicole Grimes, thank you for this beautiful cover. And to Karen Watson, Cheryl Kerwin, Kristen Schumacher, and Shaina Turner, thank you for helping readers find this book!

  To ACFW and the many writers who’ve read my work and helped me hone my craft over the years—Tessa Afshar, Melanie Brasher, Edwina Cowgill, and Nicole Miller. A special thank-you to Sandra Ardoin for her valuable insight and encouragement during our weekly check-ins, and to Melissa Jagears for not only being a wonderful friend and mentor, but for squeezing me into her own busy schedule when I’m struggling with those stubborn plots and characters.

  This book would never have come to be if not for Susan Brower taking the time to read the first draft and give me advice to make it stronger.

  Thank you to David Lambert, chief
genealogist at NEHGS in Boston, for sparking an idea that helped tie these two stories together.

  I’m very grateful for my local librarians. Thank you to Carol Gafford, who explained some genealogical research to me, and to Kaija Gallucci for organizing our local writers’ group.

  Thank you to my church family at WDCC, and especially to John and Pam McPherson, who showed me how truly sufficient the grace of Jesus is.

  Thank you to my parents, Scott and Donna Anuszczyk, who’ve taught me that real love is hard work, but it is so worth it. I love you guys. Mom, sometimes when I write words on paper, I hear you in them. I’m convinced your side of the family gave me this writing gene, and I’m happy to have inherited it. Thank you for teaching me to pursue my dreams.

  Thank you to my sister, Krystal, for listening to me whine about all those rejections, and for being not only my sister, but one of my closest friends.

  Thank you to my sons, James and Noah, for putting up with my computer, for jumping up and down with me at news of a contract, and for making every day both a joy and an adventure. Boys, I’m so proud to be your mom. I love you to the moon and back.

  I am so incredibly grateful for my husband, Daniel, who not only encouraged me with words, but who worked many side jobs to help me afford travel to conferences. I could never write a fictitious hero without the inspiration of a real one right in my kitchen. Thank you, honey.

  Last, but far from least, I am amazingly thankful to my God. He pursues me with a grace I don’t deserve, then gives me my dreams on top of it. Jesus, you rock.

  PROLOGUE

  Anaya

  BOSTON

  PATRIOTS’ DAY, 2013

  Death’s threshold overwhelmed me in a swell of instant silence and intense heat. The minute before the flash of white and loud pop, pop, pop, I’d been pushing the burning muscles of my legs forward in a last throttle of energy, my eyes on the blue finish line of the Boston Marathon. I’d heard my sister’s cheers from behind the nearby barricades that separated the racers from the spectators. I knew my niece was with her, and I searched them out, spotted them. Lydia in a Red Sox cap, her daughter, Grace, bouncing with excitement beside her. An insatiable urge to hug them now, in this moment, overwhelmed me. Especially Grace, who trained with me the last four months but would have to wait a few more years to be eligible for the race. Grace, who I knew expected me at the finish line at least fifteen minutes earlier.

  I ignored the burning in my lungs and lifted my arms to reach over the barricade to hug my niece, her eyes bright and dancing.

  I never touched her.

  I was late. Too late.

  Now the foggy quiet fell over me in a thick cloak. I lay on the road, marveling at the blue sky through the sulfur-scented haze. I opened my mouth to cry for help but could not hear my own screams. I lifted my head to see a blur of mangled limbs and blood and glass on the pavement of Boylston Street. The crush of hurting people transformed the celebratory race finish into a hot, smoky place of torture. The scent of burned flesh assaulted my nostrils. Sour bile pooled in the back of my throat. I didn’t allow my eyes to roam my own body but let my head fall back on the street.

  I would die. Here, alone.

  I ordered my harried thoughts to grab an assurance, a sense of peace, about dying. None could be found. Truth was, I hadn’t given the afterlife much thought until now.

  My eyelids grew heavy, and I knew if I succumbed to their pull, I would be in eternity—whatever that held—in the next moment.

  Only thoughts of my sister and niece made me fight. They’d come to support me. What if one of the distorted limbs or lumps of flesh I saw belonged to them? What if they lay somewhere . . . dying?

  I cried for help again, my voice faint this time. Muffled sound—animalistic screaming—faded in and out, and then he was beside me.

  In a place where I questioned whether I’d ever feel human touch again, his warm hand found mine and squeezed. I pressed back and clung with the dregs of my strength.

  “You’re going to be okay.” The words sounded through the muted fog, but I latched on to them as if they were life.

  He wrested his hand from mine and then his arms were under me, lifting me. My eyelids fluttered and I was only conscious of the feeling of security against the blue Red Sox sweatshirt, of pressing my nose into it and smelling something spicy and woodsy to replace the smog of sulfur and singed flesh clinging to my nostrils.

  I must have blacked out, for when I woke, an EMT pushed a needle into one of the veins in the back of my hand. The tightness of the ambulance confines tugged a surge of rebellion through my belly. My rescuer would leave me.

  “Don’t go!” I didn’t know what I was saying, and I did. I grabbed for the stranger’s hands, and he pressed something cool into my palm, placed my fingers around it, and then laid my hand on my chest. His words faded in and out. Others needed help. Like Lydia. Like Grace. He’d find me.

  He said he’d find me.

  Some time later, I woke in a hospital bed to hazy thoughts. I tried to comprehend that I’d been in some sort of explosion, that I still didn’t know the fate of my sister and niece. In my loosened palm lay the object the stranger had pressed into my bloodied fingers.

  A gold signet ring. The flat oval bore an engraving of a shield. An anchor was set in gems at the bottom left of the shield, and at the top right, the symbol of a horn. I skimmed over the Latin inscription on the top and read the name Smythe written in dark-green jewels beneath. The weight of the ring and the worn edges whispered of stories of long ago, stories that had lain dormant for generations.

  It felt like a holy relic of sorts, one that had whisked me away from terror and explosions and mangled limbs and broken people.

  My arms burned with a sudden longing to hold Grace as the explosion hadn’t allowed me to do. I curled the ring in my fist and pressed the call button for the nurse with my other, trembling hand.

  In a moment I heard the slight shuffle of rubber shoes against linoleum, coming toward my room. I inhaled a tight breath, pushed aside the horrifying visions from the finish line, and prayed the nurse would have good news of my family.

  TWENTY-THREE MONTHS LATER

  I stared at the potted lily in my hand, its pure white petals fresh against the backdrop of my sister’s stained wood door.

  Maybe flowers were overkill. I wasn’t looking for a date, after all. I was looking for . . .

  What was I looking for? Why was I here?

  The unexpected phone call with my mother the night before replayed in my head, along with the news she had shared.

  “I talked to Lydia today. It looks like Roger’s going to take a job in the UK.”

  The statement ripped through me. I hadn’t seen Lydia or her family in over a year and a half, but this news broke on me with the sudden realization that I might never see them again.

  So here I was, after nearly seven hundred days of silence. Trying to reconcile the fact that each day I could have picked up the phone, tried to mend the fragments of our relationship, but I hadn’t.

  I closed my eyes, concentrated on the familiar weight of the object attached to the chain at my neck. The ring, Red Sox Sweatshirt, my sister, and my crippled niece—they’d all jumbled together the last two years to create a fierce, writhing fairy-tale nightmare that wouldn’t release me from its vicious hold.

  I freed a quaking breath, clutched at the cool plastic of the flowerpot in my hand. Qui fortis salutem tribuet.

  It was the Latin inscription on the ring belonging to the man who’d never bothered to find me after the day of the bombing.

  I breathed around the preposterous feeling of abandonment, focused instead on the meaning of the words, tried to draw strength from them, from the ring itself. Victory belongs to the one who is strong.

  Boston Strong.

  I shook my head against the slogan that had rallied Boston to its feet just days after the crisis that rocked the city. I shouldn’t think of it now. It only taunted me. Whether
on T-shirts, hats, sports memorabilia, bumper stickers, billboards, or even the destination signs on buses, the two words tormented me, calling me to be something I wasn’t.

  Strong.

  Why I thought I could suddenly draw hope from these etched words just because I stood at my sister’s threshold, I hadn’t a clue.

  I turned around instead of knocking again, convinced I needed something more to face what was behind this door. But the hinges creaked behind me. I turned, and there she stood.

  She’d gotten more beautiful the last two years, young womanhood making her blossom and mature. And I’d missed it all.

  “Grace . . .” I could scarcely push her name past my lips, for the sudden emotion in my throat. She stood at eye level with me. I’d expected a wheelchair, a crutch, something. But a quick—what I hoped to be discreet—scan of her lower half revealed two legs clad in skinny jeans. She looked like a healthy, normal teenage girl, thanks to prosthetics.

  I would not cry.

  “Auntie Annie. Wow, you’re here.”

  “I—um, maybe I should have called first, but—”

  “No. No, this is great.” She opened the door wider, threw her long, honey-colored ponytail over her shoulder. “I was just thinking about going for a run, but that can wait. Mom’s out catching up on some errands, Dad’s fiddling in the garage, Joel went to a friend’s, so, like, it’s just me.” She closed the door behind us. “I hope that’s . . . okay.”

  She was about to go for a run. A run. I thought she’d never walk—never mind run—again. I knew in my head people who lost limbs could still do many things others could do, but in my mind Grace was as I’d last seen her. Crippled, in a wheelchair. Bruised both inside and out.

  I inhaled the scent of pine furniture polish, the house as tidy as my sister’s room when we were kids. On counters and hutches were dried flowers of every type—hydrangeas, carnations, larkspur, peonies.

  “Let me take that.” Grace held out her arms for the lily and I released it, noticing the slightest of limps when she walked to the kitchen counter to set the pot down.