“Oh, honey. Whyever not?” Tressa glanced briefly around the apartment. “You don’t have anywhere else to go until spring, do you? And even if you found somewhere to stay, you’d be living off your savings. I don’t see how you can get a new sewing machine to town before the harbor melts, and all the mending you had waiting is gone. What do you have to lose?”
Everything.She pressed her eyes shut against the scalding tears. “I’m a mess, aren’t I? Here I just lost everything…” She shoved a hand toward the window. “Or rather, most of everything, and yet somehow it’s harder for me to tell Thomas yes than to face the loss of my shop. What’s wrong with me? I see that you and Mac have a good marriage. He loves you, you love him, you both make sacrifices for each other. And somewhere deep inside, I want the same thing.”
She didn’t even try to stem her tears, just let them stream down her face and plop into her lap. “So if I know I want a relationship like yours and Mac’s, and my husband has returned and wants another chance to be a family, why can’t I summon up the desire to try?”
Tressa sat beside her, her hand rubbing little circles on Sarah’s back while the babe slept blissfully unaware. “Because it’s not the same thing. You forget that Mac isn’t my firsthusband—he’s not the one who did me wrong. Did I have a hard time trusting Mac would be good to me after I spent ten years with Otis? Yes. But it’s still not the same as me looking Otis in the eyes and telling him I forgive him for all the lies, all the gambling, all the other women.”
Tressa pressed a hand to her throat, her gaze lost in her memories. “I don’t know that I could have done it. Rebuilding a life with Otis would have been much harder than learning to trust Mac. Because Mac never hurt me the way Otis did, or the way Thomas hurt you.”
Jessalyn sucked in a deep, shaky breath. “So you don’t think I should try trusting him again?”
“I didn’t say that.” Tressa looked toward the window, though neither of them could see their children or husbands while sitting. “I just said it would be harder than what I did with Mac. But worth it, if you can find a way. Are there times, even now, when my relationship with Mac is hard? When I struggle with trust or when he does something I don’t care for, and I see Otis’s deceitful actions instead of Mac’s oblivious ones? Yes. But my marriage is still worth the effort of working through those hardships. Very, very worth the effort. Plus you have the girls to consider.”
“They love him.” Jessalyn coughed another bit of phlegm into her handkerchief. “He’s only been here two weeks, and I already can’t imagine separating them come spring.”
Tressa sat back. “Then you have to try that truce. And you have to let God do the work. Have you thought of that verse I shared with you? ‘Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it.’”
“Not overmuch, no,” Jessalyn muttered.
“I think Thomas is right about setting aside the future for a few months so you can focus on healing, on seeing if you can build a relationship on the rubble from your past. Could be thefoundation is still good, you just need to clear away the ashes first.”
Clear away the ashes.Jessalyn stifled another cough. That didn’t sound too hard. Now if only she could be guaranteed her heart wouldn’t break in the process.
Chapter Sixteen
Jessalyn huddled deeper inside her borrowed coat to ward away the wind whipping off the lake. Clearing away the ashes of her marriage and rebuilding on its foundation had seemed possible earlier, just like rebuilding her shop hadn’t seemed hopeless when she had been looking down at the rubble heap from Isaac’s apartment window. But now that she stood beside it?
There wasn’t anything of value left. Not half a sketch of one of her dresses, not a single remaining shirtwaist. It was all ruined.
There certainly wasn’t a foundation left beneath all the burned wood. What if Tressa was wrong about her marriage too, what if there was nothing valuable worth salvaging between her and Thomas?
“I don’t think it was your lamp, Jessalyn.” Isaac called from where he stood with Thomas on the other side of the rubble heap. He pointed to a black, sooty spot at the back of her building. “It looks like the fire started there, by the back door. Unless you left your lamp there?”
“No, here by my sewing machine, where I always leave it.”
Isaac came around the destroyed building toward her, looking at the westward wall where her sewing machine had once sat. Or rather, where it still did sit. Not all of it had burned. Evidently the fire hadn’t gotten hot enough to melt all the metal, despite the mounds of clothes that had gone up in flames.
Another gust of wind from the lake lashed at her, tearing bits of hair from her updo and plastering them across her face. Above, the sky was a dark gray, almost the color of the smoke that had risen from the fire last night. At least it hadn’t been this windy yesterday, or half the town would have burned.
“Well, wherever it started, we were wrong to assume it was by the stove.” Thomas still stood by the opposite wall of the rubble heap. “This is the only section of the building that didn’t burn.”
She left Isaac and headed around the remnants of her building to her husband, his dark coat nearly causing him to blend into the rubble and soot-blackened snow.
He’d not said anything when she told him she was responsible for the fire. Not a single word about how she should have let him help with her shop or how she was doing too much. Nothing about how she should have gone to bed at a decent hour. He hadn’t even suggested that if she’d forgiven him for gambling their money, she might not have gone to bed angry and lost her common sense. He’d only said Isaac wanted her to come down and look at the building before they cleared away too much of it.
It was somehow worse than shouting or lecturing her. He’d never had trouble pointing out her mistakes before. But today his forehead had scrunched down into a pained look, and then he held out one of Isaac’s coats for her to put on.
So here she was, clad in Isaac’s overlarge mackinaw coat, the red and black plaid clashing horribly with her purple dress.
“Almost all of the woodstove, wall, and chimney are still standing.” Thomas pointed to the blackened stone. “If the firewould have started here, there would be more damage. It’s almost as though the flames left the stone section alone since there was so much fabric and wood to devour.”
She swept her gaze over the woodstove, still standing though coated with a layer of grime, then surveyed the chimney and stone wall behind the stove.
She had to agree to his truce. How else would she be able to tell whether their marriage was like the logs turned to ashes or the standing chimney?
“Jess?”
She bit the side of her lip and ran her gaze over the charred stone once more. “So if the fire didn’t start by the stove, then it must have begun by my lamp. There was no flame near the back door.”
