Page 120 of Charlotte

“Then start with one step.”

His eyes opened.

“That is all Jeb did,” she said. “One command. One breath. A single plank lifted because it had to be lifted.”

Cecil looked toward the place where the beam had fallen.

“Your hand held,” she whispered. “So did you.”

His remaining fingers flexed once. A shout came from up the beach, calling Peterson.

Of course.

Wild Rose Ridge had a gift for interruption.

Cecil looked over his shoulder, then back at Lottie.

“Go,” she said. He hesitated. She smiled, though it hurt. “I am not going anywhere.”

The words reached him, then he turned and went to help the men with the ropes, walking not quickly, not away from her, but toward what needed doing.

Lottie stayed by the lake and watched him go.

Behind her, Delly laughed through tears at something Jeb said. The sound was new and familiar at once.

Love had not made her sister safe.

It had made her brave.

Lottie looked down at her own hands, still sandy from holding Samuel’s. She had meant what she told Cecil.

She would not chase him now.

On the Fourth of July, if he still could not step forward, she would speak the truth in the open and plan to leave Wild Rose Ridge.

Chapter Eighteen

July 3, 1886 — The Hotel and the church

Lottie did not attend the Independence Jubilee.

She meant to, telling everyone she would be there. She had even put on her best dress Saturday evening and tied her bonnet ribbons twice because the first attempt sat crooked. When the first fiddle tune drifted up from Main Street, bright and merry and full of all the things she did not know how to feel anymore, Lottie sat down on the edge of the hotel bed and could not make herself rise again.

The whole town danced without her.

She heard it through the open window: boots on boards, laughter from the beach road, the lilt of several fiddles. Mrs. Beck called for someone to rescue the star cakes before the children found them. Once, much later, she heard a cheer go up, followed by the wild scrape of a reel playing too quickly.

She wondered if Cecil was there, standing at the edge with his arms folded, watching other people do what he had decided he could not.

Would he notice she was missing?

She hated herself a little for wondering.

By the time the music faded, and Wild Rose Ridge settled into the soft, tired quiet after a celebration, Lottie had cried enough to leave herself hollow. She wasn’t healed, simply empty.

Sunday morning came bright, blue, and indecently cheerful. Wild Rose Ridge, for all its spent lanterns, sagging bunting, crumbs of cake, and children still sticky from yesterday’s celebration, went to church before it allowed the holiday to be called complete.

Lottie appreciated but also resented it.