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“Almost seven-thirty,” he said.
“Who were you talking to?’
“Your Daddy,” he said, handing over her phone. “I called your aunt too, and answered all of Jon’s texts.”
Gretchen looked at her phone and back to him. “My shop really caught on fire.” She wasn’t asking, but she needed confirmation.
Will nodded, his lovely eyes filled with compassion and concern. “We’ll figure it out, Gretchen.”
She wanted to ask him how, so she opened her mouth and did.
“I don’t know, Gretchen,” he said, sighing. It wasn’t his barking tone, or his sympathetic one. It was one that said he’d slept on the couch with her cat. “But we will, okay?” He set Elvis down and faced her. “I’m right here, and I’m not going to leave your side today. We’ll figure everything out.”
She nodded, because she wanted to believe him. Her mind misfired at her, and then she pulled back on her panic. “I need to call my landlord.”
“Okay,” Will said, trying to take the phone from her. “Tell me who it is, and I’ll do it.”
Gretchen didn’t release the phone. “No, I’ll do it.” She took a deep breath, and then another one. “I can do it.”
He’d called her aunt and her father, and she could do this. “What did Daddy say to you?”
“He said he’d call and cancel his appointments this week,” Will said. “I told him I’d be there this afternoon to help with his oxygen tank.”
Gretchen’s eyes filled with tears again. She wanted to say thank you, but instead, she simply nodded and looked down at her phone. The letters on it blurred, but she blinked, and everything came into focus.
“I’ll call Kevin right now.” She headed for the front door, realizing why Will had gone outside to make the call. She needed more air than the house currently held, and she tapped to make the call as she stepped from living room to porch.
“Gretchen,” he said, relief in his voice. “How are you? Are you okay?”
Instant tears filled her eyes, but she channeled her inner Will and said, “Yes, Kevin. I’m okay, and all of my employees made it out safely.” She took a big breath, not even sure how she should start.
Thankfully, Kevin said, “I’m going through the damage with the fire marshal at ten o’clock this morning, Gretchen,” he said. “If you want to come down, we can talk more then. Get a better picture of what might happen.”
“Sure,” she said as brightly as she could. She had no idea how the sun rose each day, when something so terrible had happened in the night. “I’ll be there at ten.”
* * *
Gretchen pulledinto the parking lot where her candy shop still sat. The front of the building didn’t look much different, besides the fact that she hadn’t moved her candy apple truck in over two weeks.
The exhaustion she carried from dawn until dusk was the same. The worry about whether she could reopen continued day after day. The bad news just kept coming.
Or it had, in the beginning. The only employee she’d retained was Jon, and only because she’d begged him to please, please not quit, and then promised to keep paying him. She couldn’t do that for any of her other employees, and all of them had quit.
They had to, and Gretchen understood why. They needed their jobs, and she couldn’t pay them while the back of the unit on the end of the building got cleaned, dried, and then rebuilt.
Well, the rebuilding was still to come. Gretchen drove around the back of the building, which had been draped in plastic. The fire marshal had deemed the building stable enough to enter when she’d been there with Kevin and Will a couple of weeks ago. She’d been able to go inside with the marshal and collect the things she deemed valuable from her office, which included the computer, her recipe books, and all of her personal belongings.
Then, Kevin had called a fire restoration specialist, and they’d come in with their Dumpsters, shovels, and wheelbarrows. They cleaned out the south kitchen, where Jon had been making sugar art for the tops of the miniature cupcakes they’d needed for a birthday party. He’d gotten distracted when he’d dropped a tray of said cupcakes, and the sugar had burned.
He’d taken it from the flame in frustration, and when he’d dumped it in the trash can, the heat from it had ignited some brittle paper he’d put there earlier. Gretchen had asked him to stop there, because he’d then said, “You wouldn’t believe how fast the flames kicked up,” and she didn’t want to imagine him in that kitchen, trying to put them out. Panicking. Breathing in the smoke.
The whole back corner of the building had been soaked with gallons and gallons of water, and that took a very, very long time to dry out. Wood, plaster, and anything that could mold got ripped out. That was basically everything down to the foundation. The wall separating the kitchen from the retail space in the shop had been torn back to the studs, and then the fans had blown and blown and blown.
Gretchen had barely gotten out of her car when the rumble of Will’s truck came around the corner. She smiled at him, but she wasn’t sure how she had the energy. She’d seen him every single day since the disaster, and if she’d known that was all it would take, she might’ve lit her candy kitchen on fire much earlier.
Not really, and she hated thinking that.
He pulled in next to her and got out of his vehicle. A paper bag rustled as he came around the hood, signaling that he’d been to town already. He lifted the pastry bag and said, “The cream cheese scone.”
