“Ah, the picture is coming into view.”
She stabbed a cherry tomato with her fork as her stomach turned. She didn’t often talk about her life with Bruce. It was too humiliating to think about.
“What picture?”
“The reason you want to renovate the chapel. You have a passion for design.”
She smiled. “I guess.”
“So what did you focus on in school?”
She fiddled with her fork. “Nothing. I never went.”
“No?”
She shook her head as her cheeks flamed. And then she remembered what Caleb had said earlier. Fear was just a state of mind.
“It took Bruce a long time to finish. It was expensive living in California, paying for living expenses and tuition.”
“You put Bruce through school.”
“Yeah. He didn’t have much growing up. He’d worked as a ranch hand at different ranches before I met him. I met him when I was riding down at the Lone Creek Ranch.”
“With Julie.”
She nodded. Caleb smiled when he said his sister’s name, but it was melancholy just the same.
“Bruce worked there for a while. He had these dreams and I bought into them. He wanted to do something big with his life and get out of ranching. To me, California seemed so grand and wonderful.”
“Was it?”
She sputtered but continued to play with a pepper in her salad. “It wasn’t anything special where we were. We couldn’t afford to live anywhere grand and it was a college town. It was mostly kids who were there for school and most of the businesses catered to visiting parents and such. It was quiet. A lot like Sweet.”
“And then…what happened?”
“You mean the divorce?”
He shrugged. “You don’t have to talk about it.”
“He used me and then left, taking all the money that I’d saved for design school with him. It’s no big deal. Well, it was a big deal. It was a rotten thing he did. It’s just something I’m trying to move on from.”
“And you think buying a chapel with a ton of acreage around it is moving on?”
“How did you know the property had a lot of acreage? I didn’t even know that until I went searching for the deed.”
“I did some checking myself.”
“Oh.” She drenched a piece of lettuce with some salad dressing and then popped it into her mouth. The server placed Caleb’s meal in front of him and her stew in front of her.
“So tell me the plan?”
Katie was glad the subject moved on from her failed marriage to Bruce to what was current in her life.
“The plan is to turn the chapel into a home and then sell the whole thing. Once it’s sold, I’ll have money to leave and start my life again.”
“Go to design school?”
“Yeah. Or something else. I’m not sure. I mean, I know I could do that now. I didn’t have to buy the chapel. Lord knows Kas offered to pay for my schooling enough times. But that’s not the same thing as me doing it myself.”
“I see.”
“Do you?”
“I think so,” Caleb said.
She proceeded to talk his ear off while they ate their lunch, telling him about where she planned to put the kitchen and how she hoped the plumbing wouldn’t be too cumbersome and intrusive on the design. It didn’t surprise her he was finished with his meal before she’d even started on her stew, which was now cold. But she was having too much fun with Caleb as her audience while she let her mind run wild with her ideas.
“So what do you think? You haven’t said much,” she finally said.
“I was hungry.”
She picked up her napkin, crumpled it in a ball and threw it at him. “Stop that.”
He grabbed the napkin, and put it aside. “I think…it’s an amazing idea.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. Who’s your builder?”
Katie’s shoulders sagged. “I haven’t gotten that far yet.”
And then he laughed so hard that people in the diner turned to look at them.
* * *
The snow they’d feared would do some damage had turned out to be a monster. Over the weekend, they’d had a storm that had not only leaked inside the chapel, but it had turned the small hole in the roof into a wide hole giving them a clear view of the now blue sky above. It was as if God decided there needed to be a skylight in the chapel and ordered the snow to make one.
“How many contractors do you have coming out to look at the place today?” Caleb asked, keeping his eye on the hole in the cathedral ceiling.
“Just the one. Tomorrow I have a plumber coming to give me an estimate.”
“What about the roofer?”
“He can’t get out for another week,” Katie said, looking at her notepad with all the names, and numbers on it.
“We need to get someone up there to secure that beam. The snowfall we had over the weekend really did a job in weakening the roof. I’m surprised it hasn’t caved in completely.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t be in here at all,” Katie said, studying the gaping hole in the roof.
Caleb looked at the blue sky and thought of how odd it was to be standing inside the chapel and seeing such color. Colors that were not a result of the beautiful stained glass windows.
“I think you’re right. Those beams need to be fixed to give the rest of the roof some structural support until we can have somebody out here to assess the full damage. In the meantime, we can tape off the area below so no one walks beneath it.”
He glanced at Katie and saw her biting her bottom lip as she looked at the floor.
“What about saving these floors. The wood is so beautiful. I’d hoped to be able to save most of them. But if that roof continues to collapse before we have a chance to do anything, then the floors are gone.”
“It can’t be helped. It’s lasted this long in disrepair. It’ll have to hang on for a few more weeks.”
She looked around as if
