“Of course not.”
“Then what are you saying?”
Why was he asking her that? All the optimism she’d been feeling vanished. “Why couldn’t he be only partially responsible? The Dumpster was too close to the building. And someone had discarded pine scraps inside it instead of following proper procedure.”
“You have no idea what you are talking about.”
“All I’m saying is that maybe—just maybe—my father wasn’t the only man responsible for five people’s deaths.”
“I’ve practically grown up in that mill,” he stated, his voice now as cold as his glare. “I run it now. That isn’t how things work there. We take care of the buildings and the men and the machinery. Everyone who works there is considered family.”
“My daed loved that mill, too. He wouldn’t have done anything foolhardy without reason.”
The skin around Lukas’s lips turned white. “You know, I came over here because I missed you. These last few weeks have been hard, really hard, for me.”
“For me, too.” Though, truly, “hard” didn’t begin to describe how devastated she was.
“I had hoped that we could move on. You and I have been friends for years. For most of our lives.”
“I haven’t forgotten. But we can’t erase what has happened. We simply can’t be friends now.”
He grabbed hold of the stamps and stuffed them in his jacket pocket, no doubt wrinkling them. “It was a mistake to come in here today. It was a mistake to feel sorry for you.”
So he hadn’t wanted to see her as a friend . . . he felt sorry for her.
Undoubtedly, he was thinking of his family’s reputation. The Kinsinger family was everything to a lot of people in Charm. They not only paid hundreds of people’s salaries but they had also somehow become models for proper behavior.
Now Darla knew that Lukas had come to find her because he’d wanted to do the right thing so the biddies sitting in the back of the church could whisper to each other how wonderful he was. Not only was he taking care of his family and the lumberyard, but he was good enough to reach out to the daughter of the man who’d caused so much pain and suffering.
Her heart was breaking, but she had to stay tough. If she didn’t, they were both going to say more hurtful words to each other and she didn’t know if she could handle that. It was hard enough coming to terms with the fact that she and Lukas couldn’t ever be close friends again. “Next time you need stamps, you should probably send in someone else.”
The look he gave her was so cold, it could have frozen her to the spot.
When the door closed behind him with the faint jingling of bells, Darla closed her eyes and tried to erase the pain. But just like the glory of the day’s sunrise, it was unstoppable. There were some things that were simply destined to happen, no matter what.
Chapter 2
That girl. That, that . . . woman!
As he strode down Main Street toward the Kinsinger Lumber Mill’s main office, Lukas felt like throwing his hat on the ground and stomping on it. And then turning right back around, yanking open the glass door of the post offic,e and marching in to tell Darla Kurtz exactly what he thought of her snide suspicions.
While he was at it, he would go ahead and tell her exactly what he thought about her standing on the other side of that worn counter and shoving an awful sheet of bird stamps at him without so much as a smile.
And then, well, he would tell her how much he missed her. How much he’d needed her over the last three months. She was the only person with whom he didn’t have to act confident and sure. He could just be Luke.
Not the son who’d stood at his father’s grave and vowed to always look after the people who depended on him. Not Lukas Kinsinger, who ran the biggest business in Charm and was now responsible for hundreds of men’s livelihoods.
Not the eldest brother whom his sisters and younger brother now depended on.
But whether she’d pushed him away in order to rile him up or because she didn’t care about him anymore, he didn’t know. He’d been disappointed when he’d realized that she wasn’t as eager to mend things between them. She was wrong to think that keeping away from each other was going to help their grief or heal their families’ heartache.
Yes, everything was difficult right now—beyond difficult, and painful, too—but that was how he knew they should be reaching out to each other, not pushing away. Not only did it make sense, but it was the best thing for the lumber mill and maybe even the town itself. Everyone knew that there was a lot of tension between their families and it was causing a lot of talk.