Page 14 of Charlotte

“I know many things.”

“About him?”

“A few.”

“Will you tell me?”

Val studied her for a moment. There was kindness in her face, but not the soft kind which gave a girl what she wanted simply because she asked sweetly enough.

“Some things are his to tell.”

“That is what people say when the thing is bad.”

“Sometimes,” Val said. “Sometimes it only means the thing belongs to the person who lived it.”

Lottie looked toward the side door. She did not like that answer. She respected it. Why was everything so inconvenient?

Across the room, Mr. Simms put down his empty plate and left without giving Delly one proper figure about how often he came home with blood on him. Delly stared at her notebook as though betrayed by both man and paper. Val watched the doorway with a smile tucked into the corner of her mouth.

“Oh,” Val said softly. “You poor lamb.”

Delly frowned. “I asked a practical question.”

“Aye,” Val said. “That’s the trouble.”

Lottie almost laughed. Almost. Then her gaze returned to the side door. She thought of the way Mr. Peterson had caught the book before it fell. The way he had not let their fingers touch. The way his face had closed when she asked about the initial C.

Peterson will do.

It was not the answer of a man who did not care what she called him. It was the answer of a man who cared too much. Lottie finally took a bite of cake. It was delicious. Wild Rose Ridge understood cake, which seemed promising for the future.

She looked down at Tennyson’s damp corner and smoothed it with her thumb.

Mr. Peterson—Peterson at his request—had warned her not to build too much on a man picking up a book. That was fair, but he had picked up the book.

He had caught it when she nearly dropped it. He had heard her apology and believed it. Lottie took another bite and decided, with as much wisdom as she could gather after one long day, she would not build too much.

Not yet.

She would not tear down the foundation either.

Chapter Three

June 20, 1886 — after the morning church service

Charlotte had always loved the sound of church bells.

Even when they were cracked, too loud, too thin, or rung by a boy who believed enthusiasm was a proper substitute for rhythm, church bells meant people were gathering. The sound meant hymns lifted by voices both fine and unfortunate, and a room where even strangers could sit together and be reminded they belonged to God before they belonged anywhere else.

Wild Rose Ridge’s bell was not elegant.

It rang with a bright, uneven clang which chased birds from the church roof and sent two children near the steps into fits of laughter. Lottie loved it immediately.

The little white church stood above the river, simple and clean, with pine boards scrubbed pale by weather and care. By the time Lottie arrived with Delly and the other brides, the building was already full enough that every head turned.

Lottie felt the looking. She had been looked at before, of course. In Chicago, people looked at girls who rented rooms above milliners and carried books home under patched shawls. They looked to measure, to judge, or to decide whether one was respectable enough to ignore.

This was different.