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I didn’t want him if he couldn’t be faithful to me, not that she would care.
As I walked to my car, the tears welled again. I didn’t even get the key in the ignition before I broke down sobbing out of heartbreak and betrayal. The ring got shoved into one of the cupholders for now, so that I didn’t have to feel the tight band throb against my skin.
I’d have to let everyone know there would be no wedding.
Chapter two
Luke
I made sure all of the maps aligned on the table, in one nice, neat stack. Fishing season would be starting soon here in Waterfront, Idaho. My lodge had to be absolutely ready. Thankfully, I had a few people on hand to help me make the transition from the off-season (when ice-fishing by the locals was a more common thing up here near the Canadian border) into the pleasant fishing season with the spring and summer when the lodge opened and bustled with business.
My cousins, Wyatt and Seth Harper, would be arriving in the next day or two to help me make sure everything was ready. They also served as good guides on the off-road vehicles that were available for rent here at the lodge. Some people didn’t come for the fishing but just to get away and be in nature for a while. I’d met at least one businessman who actually made it well-known to his clients that he was here in Waterfront for half the year because the summer was much more agreeable than the summers in Canada.
And since most of my business was going to come from repeat customers, keeping them happy was the main reason I wanted to keep everything pristine. They came here to enjoy being away and not having to worry about as much of the chores as they would have had to worry about at home.
However, there were always a slew of tourists who came up this way from elsewhere in the country, and even other parts of Idaho, to fish. Waterfront was known for its idyllic landscape, and the fact that it wasn’t too far from some of the best fishing in this area of Idaho wasn’t bad, either.
The maps I straightened out today had a star on the location of the fishing and hunting office in Coeur d’Alene. This was something most people forgot to do before they arrived, and I had to endure too many lectures of “but you don’t say Coeur d’Alene is an hour away on the site!” last year.
“Luke!”
The voice of my hired hand, Maverick Shelton, came through my thoughts. I sighed. He had a penchant for trouble at times, but he meant well. That was why I had hired him, honestly. He knew the area well, and he had grown up here in Waterfront. It was certainly an advantage to have since I had not grown up here.
“What do you need, Rick?” I turned around to find him walking out of the small dining room with a few splinters in his hand. “Did something break?”
“We officially need to replace a bench, or get it worked on,” Rick informed me. “That hurt. I was running my hand along it to be sure that there weren’t any splinters, and well… I got splinters.” He laughed a little and wiggled his fingers gingerly. “Do you want to see which bench after we get these out of my hand?”
“That’d be a good idea. We can configure the dining room to make sure that it’s difficult to sit on the splintering part for now, hopefully,” I said as grabbed the first-aid kit in the lobby. We kept a pair of tweezers in there for bee and wasp stings, but splinters were also a good reason to have a pair of tweezers in a first-aid kit.
Rick held still for me as I pulled the splinters out one by one. Thankfully, none were very deep. They were more painful than threatening, but I didn’t want any of the guests to get hurt. We had quite a few families come out here to enjoy the season, too. Getting splinters would hurt any child’s vacation out here.
“Well, I think that’s all of them,” I said once the splinters were out. “Let’s go see the bench.”
Rick nodded. We started walking into the dining room. However, he decided that now was not the time to keep quiet.
“When will Wyatt and Seth be coming again?” Rick pursed his lips. “Could either of them refinish that bench for us?”
“Maybe, but we’d have to ask. They’re supposed to get in next week sometime. They’re going to text me to let me know when they’re on their way,” I replied. “They’re trying to convince my aunt to come with them, but she’s not much for the outdoors. I don’t think she’d have a lot of fun here, especially since it’s a pretty small town, and she likes to go shopping at big malls and stuff. Like… often.”
“Well, at least it’s window-shopping season now too,” Rick teased. “She could easily enjoy what the little shops here in town have to offer.”
“They’d bore her pretty quickly, even if she planned out her days so that she was only going to one or two a day,” I admitted.
We arrived at the bench that Rick had been investigating by now, and I knelt to examine it closer. The splintering was all on the underside of the bench, which meant that someone’s thighs or shins were more likely to get poked by the splinters than their hands. That was, in my opinion, even worse. Those would be felt no matter what someone did, and they weren’t going to be easily seen in the mirror or without help.
“Well, that’s definitely a problem,” I confirmed to Rick. “Since we can move these benches… I say we move this one into the storage room for now and leave it at that. We have a few chairs we can bring out to replace it for now. As soon as we get the bench fixed, the chairs go back in storage.” We could sand and refinish it out in the storage room, but I didn’t want any of that dust in the dining room.
Rick nodded.
“Would you mind helping me move the bench? I can move the chairs, but this… this is a monster on its own, and with it splintering…” He shook his head. “I don’t want to have to pick more splinters out of my hand.”
We managed to get the bench out together. I left Rick to get the chairs and started preparing some of the other things that needed to be done still in the dining room. The dining room and kitchen were usually left to our cook – a young man named Moroni Williams. Moroni had actually only just graduated high school, but he’d managed to hold down the kitchen for the past few years at the lodge. When the lodge was open during the school year, he’d come in early each morning to prep sandwiches and bags of chips and cookies for the guests before heading to school. During the summer months, he was around a lot more and occasionally prepared a soup to go alongside the cold, paper-wrapped sandwiches. The food was simple and predictable.
Late last night, Moroni had texted, letting me know he’d be a bit late this morning. Since it was a Saturday and the lodge was still closed and we were only doing inventory and prepping orders today, being a bit late didn’t matter too much.
He'd arrived only a few minutes later than I had expected, but he had been slow all day. As if he were deliberating something.
Rick returned with the chairs and all the tablecloths.
