“There is nothing to forgive,” she said sincerely. Then, she smirked with mischief. “I have known for years how strongly opinionated you are.”
Mary gave a gasp of mock horror and nudged Rose’s arm with her fingertips.
“You are wicked, indeed,” she said, and both women giggled.
“Excuse me, my lady,” a voice said, interrupting their laughter. The women looked up to see the seamstress approaching them, holding the now finished dress in her hand, and an expression of tired bemusement on her face. “Your dress is ready.”
Rose blushed and bit her lip to stifle another giggle.
“Thank you,” Rose said.
When the woman walked back to her working station, the women giggled again.
“Well, shall we return home?” Mary asked.
Rose nodded. As much as she had needed a distraction, she knew that her father would need her help and support very soon.
“Yes,” Rose said.
***
Her father had already departed for the theater when she returned home. She frowned, wondering why he would not wait for her. She hoped that he was not angry with her for going with Mary to pick up their dresses before she went to the theater.
Concerned, and a bit irritated, she quickly put away her dress and rushed to the theater to meet him.
When she arrived, there were several people bustling about, cleaning and picking up pieces of debris and burned items.
As the remnants of the incident were slowly cleared away, she could see the true extent of the damage, and her heart fell. She had known that the chandelier crash and the fire had been devastating to parts of the theater, but she had convinced herself that much of the damage had been merely cosmetic.
Looking at it now, in the aftermath, she saw how wrong she had been, and why her father had been so disheveled and distressed. She found herself growing angrier with her father for having pushed her away and trying to take on all the stress alone, and she marched deeper into the theater, preparing to confront him.
Once she spotted her father, however, all of her anger melted away.
He stood toward the back of the auditorium, speaking quietly to one of the theater employees, shaking his head slowly.
His face seemed to have aged a decade since Earlier that morning, and Rose thought that his eyes appeared to be red and damp. The black circles under them had grown and deepened, and Rose wondered if he had slept at all since the incident.
Rose approached slowly, her heart breaking with every step closer she got to her father. He had not yet noticed her, as he was still very heavily engrossed in his discussion with the employee, so she began thinking as quickly as she could of something encouraging and uplifting to say to him.
She forced herself to put on a brave face and not let her father see her own sadness at the disrepair in which the incident had left their beloved theater.
With a deep breath, she steeled herself, determined to remain confident and reassuring, no matter what her father told her.
She began moving toward her father and the man to whom he was speaking at a normal pace. She had almost reached them when her father at last noticed her approach.
He gave Rose what she felt sure was supposed to be a smile, but in his exhausted and distraught state, looked like a grimace of intense pain. Her heart squeezed, but she gave her father her best, sweetest smile.
“It does not look so bad,” she said, a bit too brightly. She instantly regretted her choice of words. Any fool could have seen it was, indeed, worse than bad, and she cursed herself again.
As though reading her thoughts, her father snorted out a bitter, cool chuckle.
“If it were merely a disaster, it would be an improvement,” he said sharply.
Rose flinched at her father’s tone, but she knew he was not angry with her. Nevertheless, she hesitated before speaking again, choosing her next words with great care.
“Tell me where I can be the most help,” she said gently.
Her father looked at her for a moment, some of his Earlier gruffness leaving his expression. In that moment, Rose wished it would return, because the anger in his face was preferable to the despair that she saw without it.
“I had intended to have you oversee the hands I had hired as they got to the repairs,” he said.
Then, the anger did return, and Rose could not help feeling a small measure of relief. “But things are worse than I had imagined. Far worse.”
With these words, her father turned away from her for a moment and ran his hand through his thinning hair. Rose bit her lip, trying again to think of something to help her father.
“Then, that is what I shall do,” she said. “I shall get to it at once.”
Her father turned back around and shook his head.
“There are far more repairs needed than I anticipated,” he said. “Both you and I together could not oversee them all.”
“We have plenty of time for them to be done, do we not?” Rose asked.
Once more, her father shook his head.
“I had planned to reopen in a few days,” he said. “The night of the ball, in fact.”
Rose bit her lip again to keep her surprise from showing. She could not believe that her father had intended to reopen the theater so soon, but she knew better than to say as much.
This time, she was at a loss for any words, so she just fought to keep her expression unchanged and waited for her father to speak again.
Once more, he seemed to read her mind.
“I gave a great deal of money for the repairs,” he said, his voice beginning to rise. “And each day that we remain closed is one more day without us recovering the money spent. We cannot afford to be closed any longer, because it jeopardizes the business.”
He took a moment to heave an agitated sigh, then continued. “I will simply pay more money still for more materials and more workers to see the repairs finished in time, if that is what it takes.”
Rose opened her mouth to protest, but it was then that she noticed something she had not before.
Her father’s jaw was set in a fashion similar to the rare occasions when he had made up his mind about something and would not be moved.
However, there was a tension that was not normally present, no matter how stubborn he was being. She also saw that, behind the anger and fatigue in his eyes, there seemed to be something else. Was it fear?
“Father,” Rose said, studying her father closely. “There is something else, isn’t there?”
Her father narrowed his eyes at her, as though preparing to give her a tongue lashing.
Instead, he closed his eyes briefly, and when he opened them, Rose saw they were filling with tears. He took a deep breath, then excused himself from the employee.