The Law of Moses (The Law of Moses, #1)

by Amy Harmon

THE FIRST FEW WORDS of every story are always the hardest to write. It’s almost as if pulling them out, putting them on paper, commits you to seeing it all through.

But there are laws. There are rules. Laws of nature and laws of life. Laws of love and laws of death. And when you break them, there are consequences. And Moses and I, like a stream of fateful lovers who had gone before us and who would come after us, were subject to those laws, whether we kept them or not.

I stared at my grandmother, at her round face, her adoring smile, her guileless eyes. She was the only person who had ever made me feel like I wasn’t a burden. Or a psycho. If she wanted to tell me about baby Moses again, I would listen.

“The letter. The letter! Georgia wrote me a letter when I was at Montlake. And I never opened it. But I kept it! It was here!”

“Poe said, ‘There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion.’”

Time softens memories, sanding down the rough edges of death.

But Moses’s pictures dripped with life and reminded us of our loss.

Tomorrow it would be two years since I’d lost him and the memory should hurt, but I found I loved the soft comfort of random reminders.

And we weren’t finished. Georgia and I weren’t finished. I knew that. And Eli knew it. “You have to go now, Dad,” he whispered. “I know.”

Like Moses said, if you’re afraid of the truth you’ll never find it. But that was okay. We didn’t especially want to be found.

We let people believe what they wanted and accept what they would.

A story flawed and fractured, crazy and cracked, and most of all, a love story.

“I love you, Moses,” I said, cradling his face. “I love you too, Georgia,” he said. “Before, after, always.”