Page 101 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

I set Emma down. Gently. Into Chloe’s arms. And I turned toward Jonathan with something moving through me that was older and darker and more dangerous than anger.

Chloe’s hand caught my arm.

“Please,” she said. Her voice was ragged. Desperate. But steady underneath the desperation, the voice of a woman who knew exactly what I was about to do and was choosing, in this moment, to save me from myself. “Emma first. We need to go now. She needs a hospital. Please, Sawyer. Emma first.”

I looked at Jonathan on the floor with his smug, bleeding smile and every cell in my body wanted to walk over there and end this permanently. Not with a gun. With my hands. The way it should have been ended the moment he first laid a hand on my daughter.

But Chloe’s hand was on my arm. And Emma was bleeding in Chloe’s arms. And the choice between vengeance and my daughter was not a choice at all.

I turned away from Jonathan Marshall.

I took Emma from Chloe. Cradled her against my chest, her injured foot elevated, her face pressed into my neck. Chloe walked beside me, her hand on Emma’s back, her other hand gripping my arm, and we walked out of the gymnasium together.

Behind us, the police handcuffed Jonathan. Lifted him to his feet. Read him his rights in the flat, procedural tone of officers who had done this before and would do it again. And Jonathan’s laughter followed us down the hallway, fading with every step, growing smaller and weaker until it was nothing but an echo, and then not even that.

The ambulance was waiting outside. Paramedics took Emma from my arms and I let them, which was the hardest thing I had done all day, harder than the fighting, harder than the shooting, harder than walking away from the man who had hurt my daughter. Letting go of her. Even for a moment. Even into the hands of people who were trying to help her.

They loaded her onto the gurney. Chloe climbed in beside her. I stood at the ambulance doors and looked at my daughter lying on the white sheet with blood on her small foot and her dinosaur still somehow clutched in her hand, because she had not let go of Sir Chomps-a-Lot through the entire thing, through the guns and the fear and the shot, she had held onto the thing that made her feel safe.

“Papa,” Emma said, her voice small and tired and full of more bravery than any soldier I had ever served with. “You came.”

“I will always come,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “That is why I was not scared.”

The ambulance doors closed. The sirens started. And I stood in the parking lot of Pinewood Elementary and watched the ambulance carry my family toward the hospital and made one final promise.

Jonathan Marshall would never touch them again. The law would handle him now. The evidence would bury him. The charges would stack. And if the law failed, if the system let him slip through the cracks the way it had before, then I would be waiting.

Not with anger. Not with revenge. With the quiet, patient certainty of a man who had learned, through war and loss and the miracle of a second chance, that the only thing worth fighting for was the thing worth living for.

My family.

I got in the truck and followed the ambulance to the hospital.

36

CHLOE

The hospital waiting room was white and cold and smelled like disinfectant and dread.

I was crying. Not the quiet kind. Not the controlled kind that I had mastered over years of holding myself together in front of Emma, the kind where you swallow it down and breathe through it and pretend the tears are not there. This was the other kind. The kind that ripped out of you without permission, that shook your whole body and made sounds you did not recognize as your own.

My daughter was in surgery. My six-year-old daughter, who collected dinosaurs and sang made-up songs and called her father Papa with a certainty that could move mountains, was behind a set of doors I could not open, and doctors I did not know were working on her foot, and I was sitting in a plastic chair with mascara running down my face and my hands shaking so badly I could not hold the cup of water the nurse had given me.

Sawyer was beside me.

He was not crying. He was not shaking. He was not doing anything. He sat in the chair next to mine with his back straight and his hands on his knees and his face completely, terrifyingly blank. No emotion. No expression. Nothing. Like someone had reached inside him and turned off every switch, shut down every circuit, left nothing running except the basic mechanics of breathing and sitting upright.

I had seen him angry. I had seen him soft. I had seen him broken open by tenderness and burning with fury and everything in between. But I had never seen him like this. Empty. A man who had gone so far inside himself that the outside was just a shell, a structure with no one home.

“Sawyer,” I said.

Nothing. His eyes were fixed on the wall across from us. Not seeing it. Not seeing anything.

I took his hand. His fingers were cold. Stiff. They did not respond to mine, did not curl around them the way they always did, and the absence of that reflex scared me more than anything else because Sawyer Cole always held my hand back. Always. It was the one thing I could count on in any situation, the automatic, unconscious grip of a man who reached for me the way he reached for air.

“Sawyer,” I said again. Firmer.