17
Just a building. Just a collection of wood and metal. Maybe to see it reduced to blackened rubble shouldn’t wound Kit so. But the reality of what she was looking at speared through her with such force it buckled her legs.
She landed with her palms in wet ground on either side of her, gravel digging into her knees. The bitter scent of smoke and ash still clung to the air this Saturday morning, nearly thirty-six hours after the fire.
It wasn’t just the loss of the barn itself. It was seeing Grandpa’s dream charred and destroyed. He’d poured that concrete foundation himself. He’d framed the building’s outline. He’d envisioned its final design.
“Don’t you love the idea of it, Kit? Valley Orchard will become a gathering spot year-round for this community. Weddings and family reunions and birthday parties. We’re in the business of nurturing life, my girl.”
Had there ever been anyone as buoyant and joy-loving as Grandpa?
Beckett.
Yes.
But that was another dream seemingly lost.
“Kit.” Willa’s gentle voice came up behind her. She’d stayed the night with Kit and Lucas on Thursday. Made them breakfast. Stayed again last night. And now she’d come with Kit to meet with the fire marshal.
“It’s ruined.”
Willa stood next to her. “But it’s the only building that was ruined—none of the other buildings, none of the trees. Which is amazing considering how windy it was Thursday night. And nobody was hurt. That’s the main thing.”
She’d nearly forgotten about the tourism board members in the panic of the fire, the commotion of the crowd. By the time the fire department had settled the blaze, the weather had calmed and almost everyone had dispersed. Only Willa and Lucas had lingered.
No Dad. Lucas had told her later that, when Dad didn’t show up at the airport, he’d called his cell number several times before finally trying his office number, only to find out from an assistant that a last-minute meeting had come up. Apparently Dad had emailed her the night before, but she’d been so busy with event prep she hadn’t bothered with her inbox.
But wasn’t this important enough that he could’ve called? Would it have been that hard to pick up the phone and talk to his daughter?
The boot-shaped footprints of the fire marshal and his assistant who’d come out this morning cluttered the ground around her. She’d been surprised they wanted to come on a weekend. If they hadn’t, she’d likely still be holed up at the house.
“It would’ve worked, Willa. The building, I mean. Thursday night I had two different couples ask me about hosting weddings here.” Not counting Kate and Colton. Although would they still want Kit involved in their wedding after the way things had ended with Beckett?
Why am I even worrying about this? There’s no building. There won’t be any weddings at the orchard.
“It can still work. The foundation’s okay. Walls can be rebuilt.”
“With what money? I spent my savings on this place. I spent your savings. We’ve lost the back half of this season’s crop.”
A biting wind swept over her as she watched the fire marshal round the barn, faced streaked with cinder. She stood, ready to hear his verdict as to what could’ve possibly caused a blaze to erupt so quickly. He stopped to inspect something near the ground.
“Kit—” Willa began.
“Please don’t tell me this is just a setback, Willa, and that I shouldn’t give up. I know it could’ve been a hundred times worse. I know the mature thing to do is buck up and square my shoulders and move forward. But I’m not there. Not yet.”
Something of a smile flitted over Willa’s face before she spoke. “I wasn’t going to lecture you.”
“Sorry,” Kit muttered.
“In the past two weeks, you’ve been through a hailstorm and a fire and—judging by a certain young man’s absence of late—maybe some heartache, as well. Last thing you need is an old woman’s sermon.” Willa’s silver bangs shaded deep-set eyes brimming with compassion.
“You’re not an old woman,” Kit said.
“Tell that to my creaking joints. But what I was going to say is, you’re not in this alone.”
“Dad didn’t even show up.”
“His loss, Kit. It’s always been his loss.” Willa shielded her eyes from the sun with one hand. “I don’t know if you remember this, but that month or so your father was home when you first moved here, I was around quite a bit.”
“You’ve always been around.” Unlike Dad.
Would she ever stop thinking thoughts like that? Weighing everyone else’s presence against Dad’s absence?
“But I was around perhaps a bit more than needed during that time. I had supper almost every night with you kids and your grandparents and Mason. There were quite a few nights when your grandparents would turn in early and I’d stay and watch a TV show with the three of you.”
Where was this going? And why was Willa reminiscing now of all times?
“You and Lucas would fall asleep, and your father and I would talk.”
“Willa, are you saying—”
“I’m saying you aren’t the only one who has wished from time to time that Mason Danby wasn’t so blind to what all was waiting for him back in Maple Valley.”
Kit simply stared. She’d had no idea. No earthly idea. “I didn’t realize . . .”
“Oh, a silly woman’s long-ago fanciful wish of inviting herself into someone else’s family, it’s not at all the same as a daughter’s hurt. But sometimes knowing another person shares at least a hint of your grief, well, it can help.”
“I’m not sure it’s grief I feel as much as anger.”
Flynnie ambled across the yard, coming up beside Kit and nudging her head into Kit’s leg.
“Which is understandable. But allowing grief a little space to breathe, that can be awfully healing. Grief about your dad. Grief that you never got to know your mom. Grief about the fire and the barn and Beckett.”
She might have cried if not for the tears she’d emptied in the past day. “What would I do without you, Willa?”
The older woman pulled her into a hug. “That’s something you won’t have to worry about for a long, long time, Lord willing.”
The fire marshal’s uncomfortable throat-clearing interrupted. Kit swallowed and stepped back. “I’m ready.”
“Definitely electrical,” he said as he pulled off his baseball cap and swiped his palm over his forehead. “Obviously a lot of it’s charred, but it’s easy enough to pinpoint where it started. Electrical box in the east wall.”
Kit nodded. “That’s where we saw the sparks. But it doesn’t make sense. This was new construction. It’s not like the wiring was old.”
The fire marshal nodded. “True, but things like this happen. I was out at a fire a few months ago a couple counties away. Brand new house in a subdivision. Family had only moved in three weeks prior. Electrical fire started in the basement and consumed the entire house.”
A fluke. She’d lost Grandpa’s dream to a fluke.
“Although, it’s also a possibility something chewed on some of the wiring. You’re out in the country. Squirrels or chipmunks could’ve gotten to any exposed wiring. Or . . .” He looked down at the animal still nudging her leg.
Ohhh. She’d had Flynnie in and around the barn with her every day in the past week. She hadn’t watched her closely. It was possible . . .
Kit closed her eyes as the probability pricked through her. When she opened them again, it was to see both Willa and the fire marshal eyeing her with twin concern.
“I can’t believe my own pet might’ve caused the damage. Or an electrician’s mistake.” Or God was simply trying to get through her thick skull once and for all that she didn’t belong here. That it hadn’t been his voice urging her to plant herself here, grow roots, and watch a dream blossom.
She’d been holding on to a feeling, but look at the facts: the hail, the buyer, the fire, the barn. How much more had to happen before she got the message?
She hugged her arms to herself, her sweater flapping in the wind, several loose strings knotting from its frayed hem.
“I’ll work up an official report,” the fire marshal said. “I’m really sorry about the damage, Miss Danby. If there’s anything else . . .”
“No. But thanks for coming out so quickly.”
He shook her hand, then Willa’s, and started for his vehicle.
“I have no idea what to do next, Willa.” She’d closed the orchard for the weekend, obviously, but it might as well be for the season. She wasn’t like Beckett—she didn’t know how to charge forward without thinking and planning and lining up all her details.
She was sapped of energy and, worse, of desire.
Willa squeezed her shoulder. “You’re not in this alone. You’ll get through it with the help of people who care about you. You’re not abandoned, Kit.”
Abandoned.
The word felt like a stamp on her heart, regardless of what Willa said. Unerasable. She simply didn’t have it in her anymore to hope.
How could that be his father lying so motionless?
Beckett stood in the doorway of the intensive care unit room. He’d only made it this far last night, when the doctor had first allowed family to visit in pairs. He’d walked with Raegan from the waiting room to here, but he couldn’t make himself accompany her the rest of the way in.
Dad hadn’t been awake then. He wasn’t awake now.
The nurse adjusted one of the tubes protruding from Dad’s head bandage. “You can come in, you know.”
He made his legs work and entered. The room smelled of clean linens and greenery. So many plants of all shapes and sizes crowded the narrow windowsill, several balloons bobbing above the display. Everyone in Maple Valley must have sent something.
The nurse tucked a pillow under Dad’s head, angling him slightly. “I’d ask if you’re one of Case’s sons, but the resemblance is so obvious, it’d be a silly question.”
He couldn’t look at Dad’s face, not yet. So he looked at the IVs that disappeared into his arms. The pulse oximeter clipped to one finger. The bags hooked to a rolling machine with tubes threading to Dad’s bandages.
“This is an EVD,” the nurse explained. She fingered one of the tubes. “External ventricular drain. That helps us make sure there’s no fluid buildup around the brain. There’s an intracranial pressure monitor too. It does exactly what it sounds like—measures the pressure inside your father’s head. We’ll take that out later today, most likely.”
He sank into a chair beside the bed, finally letting himself look at Dad’s face. It was pale and slightly swollen. An oxygen mask covered his mouth and nose.
Let him live, God. Just let him live and give me so many more years with him.
The prayer had hovered like a ghost at the back of his mind, flimsy and translucent, since yesterday morning. No, since he’d first learned of the tumor. But now it was a strident pleading, devoid of any kind of elegance.
Please.
“Has he woken up at all?”
“A couple times last night. He was groggy, of course, but he knows where he is and he responded when the doctor asked him to blink, squeeze his hand, that sort of thing. He should be awake quite a bit more today.”
Beckett let out a soft breath. “Will he be in any pain?”
The nurse crossed the room, pulled a keyboard from a swiveling stand underneath the computer monitor near the door. “He’ll have a bit of a headache, yes.”
“Painkillers?”
“We gave him something mild last night. But we need to monitor his pain level, make sure there’s no undue swelling. For that reason, we don’t want to overdo the meds. Pain is an important symptom. We don’t want to risk missing it.”
Beckett nodded, now unable to look away from Dad as the nurse typed away behind him. A sudden reversal. “So he’s really going to . . . he’s going to be . . .”
The nurse’s typing stopped. He heard the creak of her stool as she stood. The padding of her footsteps nearing the bedside. Felt her hand on his shoulder. “He’s doing wonderfully, Beckett.”
He glanced up. “You know my name?”
“Your father gave me the whole rundown on your family in pre-op before the anesthesia kicked. I think it was his way of calming himself. He said you would be the one who looked the most like him.”
Tears he’d refused since yesterday morning sprang to his eyes now. The nurse patted his shoulder and then left the room.
Beckett reached for Dad’s hand, careful not to move the clip on his finger or nudge the IVs. His father’s palm was warmer than he’d expected.
He’s going to be okay.
No, they still didn’t know whether the tumor was cancerous. They should have some answers on that by Monday. But right here in this hushed moment, he could believe it. He’s going to be okay.
“I’m sorry it took me so long to get here,” he whispered to the empty room, to his sleeping father. “Not just yesterday. I’m sorry I stayed away for so long. I keep wasting time and messing up and then missing out and I’m just so sorry.”
There were no wracking sobs today, not like that day at the depot when he’d finally set free so many years of furrowed hurt. Let his dad encircle him with all the strength and comfort he’d pushed away since the day he’d left town. It had been an unshackling. A letting go.
Today was a holding on. To courage in the midst of fear. To faith in the midst of uncertainty.
To a father’s love he knew had never once wavered.
“I love you, Dad.”
Muscles that had spent tense days coiled inside him loosened now as a lone tear landed on the bedsheet and the hand holding his tightened just the slightest.