Page 34 of Finding Forever

They returned to work.

Little by little, the fireplace emerged from beneath decades of neglect. Dave cleaned another stone, exposing warm gray beneath the grime. He stood and stepped back. The fireplace wasn’t perfect. There were chips in the stone and stains that would never completely disappear.

None of that mattered. It had character. History. And it deserved to be seen again.

Hank stood beside him. “Not bad.”

“No,” Dave agreed. “Not bad at all.”

He imagined Beth walking through the door later and seeing it. He already knew what would happen. Her face would light up. She’d come straight across the room, ask a dozen questions, and probably have three ideas for how they could make the fireplace part of the arts center.

And Dave would stand here enjoying every second of it. And for once, he wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.

Chapter 20

By the third week of March, the arts center had stopped looking like a demolition site and started to look like something with a future.

Her friends were here to go over the program and update Beth with any last-minute changes. She spread the programming calendar across the plywood table.

Weighed down at the corners with a coffee thermos and two paint cans, she looked at it with something close to disbelief. When she’d first walked into the arts center, it had been a blank grid. Now it was nearly full.

“Saturdays, nine to eleven, children’s baking and art,” Susan said, tapping the square she’d claimed for herself. “I already have eleven names on the sign-up sheet, and Mabel hasn’t even posted about it yet.”

“The exhibition wall’s spoken for through June,” Rachel added, sliding a folder across the table. “I talked to four local artists this week alone. Owen’s happy to exhibit his glasswork for the first two weeks after the center opens. A quilting group out of Polson are next. Beverly’s got a whole set of historical photographs she’s been sitting on for years with nowhere to hang them, so she’s super excited to have the next booking.”

“The school’s on board for the after-school partnership,” Laurel said, quieter, checking something off a list of her own. “The principal wants to start with Tuesdays and Thursdays, if that works with the kiln schedule.”

Beth took in the four of them around the plywood table—Susan with her programming, Rachel with her contacts, Laurel with her careful lists, Maria arriving late with a tray of sandwiches nobody had asked for and everybody was glad to see—and felt something she hadn’t let herself feel in weeks. Not relief, exactly. Something steadier than relief.

“This is really happening,” she said.

“It’s been happening,” Maria said, setting the tray down. “You’re just now catching up to it.”

“I still don’t entirely understand how the kiln schedule works,” Beth admitted. “I signed off on the specs Dave sent over, but I couldn’t tell you what half of it means.”

“You don’t need to understand the kiln,” Susan told her. “You need to understand people, and people is the one thing you’ve never once gotten wrong since this started.”

“I’ve had good help,” she said. “From all of you.”

The afternoon went on in that easy, productive rhythm. They updated their calendars, made phone calls to people who wanted to be part of the center’s activities, and ticked tasks off as each piece fell into place.

Around three, Hank came through with a length of pipe over his shoulder and a look of profound suspicion on his face. “That kiln,” he announced to the table at large, “is possessed.”

Beth smiled. “It’s a kiln, Hank.”

“It’s possessed. Fired up fine on the test run this morning, and now it won’t hold its temperature to save its life. Colton’s in there right now talking to it like it’s going to answer him back.”

“Have you checked the thermocouple?” Laurel asked, not looking up from her list.

Hank blinked at her. “The what?”

“The thermocouple. It’s the sensor that reads the temperature. If it’s a donated unit, it’s probably old, and the wiring on those corrodes.” Laurel looked at Hank, and the table went silent.

“How do you know that?” Rachel asked.

“My uncle ran a pottery studio for twenty years. I spent every summer of my childhood in it.” Laurel shrugged. “It’s probably the thermocouple.”

It was, in fact, the thermocouple. Hank returned twenty minutes later smeared with paint from an unrelated mishap involving Colton, a dropped roller, and a wall that was covered in blue paint. On the positive side, Hank told everyone the kiln was fixed, and morale, on the whole, was still high.