“Good luck with the insurance company,” Noah said. “What happened to the plant sucks, but you’ll pull it back together.” He glanced pointedly at Lourdes. “At least things are looking up in other areas.”
“Yeah,” he said drily and was grateful when his phone rang, so he could justify simply waving to the others and stepping away from the crowded doorway to answer.
*
It was the chief of police who’d called Kyle. They’d spoken briefly, then Kyle had thrown on a coat and some boots and left just after his friends. He’d said he had to meet Chief Bennett and a fire investigator over at the plant.
Lourdes picked up her guitar and strummed a few chords as she imagined what the plant might look like without the cover of darkness. Would the damage be even worse than Kyle feared?
She hoped not. She also hoped that the investigation would determine how it had started. If Noelle was involved, she deserved to be punished. It’d been heartbreaking to watch Kyle see so much of his plant go up in smoke.
But that wasn’t the only thing on Lourdes’s mind. She couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened after they went to bed last night. She’d been engaged to Derrick for almost a year, had dated him for three. Shouldn’t she have wanted to be in his arms and not Kyle’s? Because at no point had she even thought of Derrick.
“What’s going on with me?” she whispered into the empty living room. Most of the things that’d seemed so important to her in Nashville felt far less important to her here—the fame, the fortune, the record sales. But never in a million years would she have expected to rebound from losing the “love of her life” so quickly. Why didn’t she miss Derrick?
She could only guess that she’d gone through so much in the preceding months that she’d gotten over him a little at a time—more with each argument. Maybe, amid all that anger and hurt pride, and the conviction of her commitment to him, which she’d never questioned, she simply hadn’t noticed that he didn’t mean as much to her as she’d come to believe.
If that was the case, Crystal had done her a huge favor, no question about it. Lourdes still had to figure out how to put her career back together now that she no longer had a manager, but at least she hadn’t married a man who didn’t deserve her trust. She was free and capable of moving on...
But to what? Could she have it all—a career and a husband and family? Or would she, like her mother, be forced to choose?
23
As Kyle walked through the burned-out shell of what used to be his office, he found it hard not to get mad all over again. Fortunately, his inventory was safe and so was his machinery. Only the office portion of the plant would need to be rebuilt. But as busy as they’d been lately, that was going to cause enough problems.