Page 103 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

I opened my eyes. The room was dim. Hours had passed. The light outside the window had changed from afternoon bright to the soft gray of early evening, and the monitors were still beeping their steady rhythm.

Emma’s eyes were open.

Green. Bright. Tired but present and aware and looking at Sawyer with an expression that was far too wise for a six-year-old, an expression that said she understood more about what had happened today than any child should have to understand.

Sawyer was beside her. His hand holding hers. His face was wet. Tears running down his cheeks without shame, without restraint, the tears of a father who had watched his daughter come through the other side of the worst day of his life.

“I am sorry, Emma,” he said. His voice was wrecked. Raw. “I am so sorry. I should have been faster. I should have gotten to you sooner. I should have stopped him before…”

“Papa.” Emma’s voice was small and hoarse and full of the kind of gentle authority that children carry when they are telling their parents something important. She squeezed his hand with her tiny fingers. “You are my savior, Papa.”

He closed his eyes. A sob escaped. One. Just one. The kind of sob that carries the weight of everything a man has been holding and cannot hold anymore.

“It is not your fault that there are bad people,” Emma said. “You came for me. You always come for me. That is why I was not scared. Because I knew you would come.”

He leaned forward and pressed his forehead to her hand. His shoulders shook. And Emma, our six-year-old daughter with a cast on her foot and a dinosaur under her arm and more courage than any soldier I had ever heard of, lifted her other hand and placed it on top of her father’s head and held it there.

“Don’t cry, Papa,” she whispered. “I am okay. See? I am right here.”

I stood behind Sawyer. Put my hands on his shoulders. Felt the tremors running through him and held on, anchoring him the way he had anchored me, and the three of us stayed like that in the hospital room with the monitors beeping and the evening light fading and the world outside continuing to turn.

Emma looked at me over Sawyer’s bowed head. Her green eyes, so much like his, found mine and held them.

“Is Papa going to be okay, Mama?”

“Yes, baby. Papa is going to be okay.”

“Good. Because I need him to carry me until my foot gets better. He is the only one strong enough.”

Sawyer laughed. Wet and broken and real, the kind of laugh that comes from the same place as tears and sounds exactly the same. He lifted his head and looked at his daughter and she looked back at him and the love between them, the fierce, unbreakable, impossible love between a father and his daughter, filled the room until there was no space left for anything else.

“I will carry you as long as you need,” he said.

“Even when I am old?”

“Even when you are old.”

“Even when I am as tall as you?”

“You will never be as tall as me.”

“Mama, Papa is being mean.”

“Papa is being honest, baby.”

Emma smiled. Small and tired and brave. And Sawyer held her hand and I held his shoulders and the hospital room held all of us, and we were still here. Broken in places. Bruised. But still here. Together. And that was enough.

That was everything.

37

SAWYER

The courtroom was quiet when the verdict came.

Not the kind of quiet that meant peace. The kind that meant everyone in the room was holding their breath, fifty people suspended in the same moment, waiting for the words that would decide how the rest of their lives would unfold.

Chloe sat beside me. Her hand was in mine and her grip was tight enough to leave marks and I did not care because my grip was the same. Emma was not here. Dollie had her at the house, watching cartoons and eating cookies and being kept as far from this room and this man and this moment as we could manage.