Page 194 of The Lumberjack and the City Slicker

And what parts stay ours.

Chapter 41

Greyson

I know Trouble is worried.

About me.

About us.

About how I’m going to handle all the noise.

The headlines.

The cameras.

The strangers who suddenly think they own a piece of my life.

My heart thuds heavy inside my chest just thinking about it.

She’s so damn sweet. So brave. So good.

But she still has doubts.

Not about loving me—I see that in her eyes every time she looks at me like I’m something solid.

No.

Her doubts are quieter than that.

They’re about whether I can stand in the light without resenting it.

Whether I’ll run again.

Whether loving me means living on shifting ground.

And that don’t sit right with me.

Because the one thing I’m sure of—surer than gravity, surer than the damn sunrise—is her.

So what I’m doing next?

Might look a little crazy.

A little unhinged.

But so did running off to live in a cabin on a mountain and refusing to let the world see me.

The sound of chuffing pulls my attention to the tree line behind the cabin, and I snort.

Scar stands there, massive and unimpressed, watching me like I’ve lost my damn mind.

“What are you looking at?” I ask him.

The old grizzly dips his head toward the clearing where I dropped the last pine weeks ago—wood I milled myself, dried, shaped, carved.

He bows down like he’s paying homage to the tree that gave its life for something new.