Page 21 of The Mountain Man Lumberjack’s Claimed Bride

"I'm going to Bette's." No waver. No crack. "Not because I'm leaving. Because you asked for time to think, and I'm going to give it to you. But I need you to understand something, Hunter."

She crosses to the table. Picks up the agency letter. Holds it up so the cream envelope catches the afternoon light through the kitchen window.

"This is paper. Terms and conditions written by a woman named Sandra Chen in an office I've never visited, about an arrangement I entered because your sister wrote a profile that described a man worth knowing." The letter goes back on the table. "What happened in your bed last night. What's been happening in this kitchen for ten days. That's not on any piece of paper. That's me. Choosing you. Every morning, every question, every loaf of bread. Me."

Her boots are by the door. She steps into them without sitting down, the way a person does when they've been putting on their own shoes for a long time without anyone there to hold them steady.

"I'll be at Bette's. When you're done thinking, you know where to find me."

The back door opens. October air rushes in, carrying pine and cold stone and the smell of a season turning. She pauses in the doorway. One last look over her shoulder.

"When you're done thinking, Hunter, I hope you remember that I didn't come to this mountain for a stipend or a safety net. I came for a man who was brave enough to let me stay. Try to still be that man when I get back."

The door closes.

The rental car starts. Gravel crunches under tires, getting quieter as she drives down the access road. Through the kitchen window, the white sedan appears between the trees, moving south toward the main road, moving away from me the way things move away when you push hard enough.

The cabin is quiet. The bread dough sits on the counter, half shaped, abandoned. Two mugs in the drying rack. My flannel, the one she wore every morning, draped over the back of her chair.

Her chair. When did it become her chair?

The letter sits on the table. Five thousand dollar stipend. Case number 4471. A man in Ohio who won't stop calling.

And underneath all of it, the question she left behind. Not the one about Kevin. Not the one about money. The one about whether I can be the man who let her stay, or whether I'm going to be the man who pushed her out because the risk of losing her was worse than the certainty of being alone.

The woodstove needs feeding. The bread needs finishing. The fence on the eastern boundary needs the staples I need to pick up from town. There are things to do, things that require hands and tools and the steady rhythm of physical work that has always been enough to fill the silence.

It's not enough.

The silence has a shape now. Nora-shaped. Kitchen-shaped. The particular absence of a woman who hums while she works and asks questions nobody has asked me in years and looks at my land with plans already forming behind her eyes.

My phone sits on the counter. Bette's number is three taps away.

Not yet. She asked me to think, so I'm going to think. But the thinking already has an answer forming underneath it, rising like dough in a warm kitchen, and it's the same answer it's been since a rental car pulled up my driveway and a woman with flour on her future stepped out and didn't flinch.

The letter goes in the woodstove. The flames take it. Case number 4471, reduced to ash.

Tomorrow. I'll go to Bette's tomorrow.

Tonight, for the first time in ten days, the cabin is quiet in all the wrong ways.

CHAPTER EIGHT

NORA

Bette's guest room has lavender curtains, a quilt her grandmother made, and a window that faces the wrong direction. East instead of south. Town rooftops instead of timber. No woodstove smell. No creek running in the distance. No sound of a man moving through a cabin at four thirty in the morning because his body won't let him sleep past dawn.

Twenty-six hours. That's how long it's been since I walked out of Hunter's kitchen with bread dough still on the counter and his flannel still draped over my chair.

His flannel. I left it. On purpose. Because if I'd taken it, the leaving would have felt too permanent, and what I needed him to understand was that leaving and gone are not the same thing.

Bette has been extraordinary. No interrogation. No prying. Just a guest room with clean sheets, a pot of soup on the stove, and a single sentence when I walked through her door with my jaw set and my eyes dry: "He's an idiot, but he's a good idiot. Give him until morning."

Morning came. Then afternoon. Now it's almost sunset, and my phone has been silent for twenty-six hours, and the lavender curtains are turning gold with the last of the October light, and the knot in my chest is tightening with every minute that passes without the sound of his truck on Bette's gravel drive.

The stupid thing is that I understand. Every word he said, every wall that went back up, every comparison to the woman who left. He's not cruel. He's terrified. Eight years of solitude built around a wound that never closed, and then a woman showed up with a letter and a smile and started rearranging his spice shelf, and the wound cracked open before he had time to brace for it.

Understanding doesn't make it hurt less.