“Katie Dobbs. What on earth are you doing in here?”
Katie shielded her eyes with her fingers as sudden nerves raced through her, replacing the cold she’d just felt. ”Do I know you?”
The man’s low chuckle sounded familiar, but she still couldn’t place it.
“I hope so. I’ve known you and your brother practically my entire life.”
The man dropped the flashlight just enough so that it wasn’t shining in her eyes directly. She squinted and took in the man’s silhouette and…the police uniform.
“Caleb? Caleb, is that you?”
“I half expected to find some kids drinking beer in here. You were the last person I expected to find sitting there.”
Caleb came into the chapel fully and made his way over to the pew where Katie was sitting. He looked around for a second, sweeping the flashlight into little corners to make sure that they were alone. Katie hadn’t even thought that someone else might be here. A homeless person maybe. But in Sweet, no one ever stayed homeless for long. With this frigid weather, someone would’ve to take a vagrant in for the night or take them to one of the bigger city shelters with the opportunity to help them get on their feet.
Seemingly satisfied, Caleb sat down next to her on the pew. As he did, Katie felt the pew rock, indicating the fasteners that braced the pew to the floor had come loose. It was no wonder. How long had this place sat in decay?
Although the flashlight provided much more light than she’d had from the moon, Katie wasn’t sure if she was relieved that she was no longer alone, or annoyed that Caleb had broken the relative quiet she had enjoyed for the first time in months.
No, that wasn’t exactly true. Katie had plenty of quiet at her family’s home. But now that her parents were snowbirds, and her brother was living in New York, she loathed going home. She knew that all the life inside of it was gone.
No, it wasn’t being alone that Katie wanted to escape from. It was fleeting thoughts that nagged at her, telling her she’d messed up by marrying a cheating man who was now giving a life Katie had dreamed of to another woman.
She chuckled softly, and looked down at her hands in shame wishing Caleb would turn off the flashlight so she could hide.
“What’s so funny?” Caleb asked.
She shrugged and quickly glanced at Caleb’s expression. He wasn’t laughing at her or judging her. She wasn’t quite sure exactly how to read Caleb. He was right that she’d known him practically their entire lives. He’d been Kasper’s friend growing up. One of the guys who’d played hockey down at the lake or gone to rodeos to see if they had the stuff of bull riders and bronc riders.
But even with their history, or maybe because of it, Katie suddenly found herself embarrassed to admit the reason she’d come to the chapel. And even more embarrassed she’d been caught wallowing.
“As long as I can remember, this place has been falling apart,” she said. “Do you ever remember a time when people used to actually come here to go to church?”
“My parents were married in this chapel,” Caleb said with a smile.
“Yeah?”
He nodded and looked around. “I have some pictures back at the house. My sister and I used to come here on Sundays when we were very little. But I don’t remember much about it other than from looking at pictures. Strange, huh?”
She shook her head, glad that he’d veered off the subject of why she was here.
“The one thing I remember was sitting and seeing the spectrum of light come through the stained glass window and shining on us as we sat in the pew. Nothing else. Just that.”
“I’d love to see that. I’ll bet it’s beautiful.”
“It was. But the chapel was too small. Sweet was growing too fast. So when the new church was built, everyone went there. After that, this one was forgotten.”
Sadness filled her. Is that what really happens? Things mean something and then they’re forgotten. And what of people? Were they so easily replaced as well?
“It wasn’t exactly forgotten,” Katie said. “Kids have been coming here on Saturday nights for a very long time. Probably still do by the look of all those beer cans over by the door. Or what there is of a door.”
Caleb chuckled and then pulled off his hat, placing it next to him in the pew. When he turned to her, she caught his amused grin with the little bit of direct light illuminating his face from the flashlight.
“True enough. I spent a few…maybe even more than a few Saturday nights here back in high school.”
Katie laughed at the amused look on his face as he remembered the past. It felt good to laugh at something other than her own missteps in life. Yeah, she had laughed at them, too. She laughed at how easy it had been to marry the wrong man, and to think her life would be different.
Caleb grinned at her. “Don’t give me that look, Katie Dobbs. I know I saw you here too on a few occasions.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything!”
His expression changed to one of concern. “What you really doing here, Katie?”
She sighed as embarrassment flooded her again. “Feeling sorry for myself. How pathetic is that?”
“We all have our moments.”
“Mine are becoming a bad habit.”
She threw her head back and looked up at the ceiling. She couldn’t see the great cathedral ceiling or the beams that supported the building, or the teardrop light fixtures that she’d seen light up in a picture one Christmas when they’d had midnight services. It was too dark to make out anything in detail or to see what was even still there, or what had been broken or taken away by vandals.
What
