Page 106 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

Josh came out of the kitchen with a case of beer under one arm and a grin on his face.

“We celebrate,” he said.

He handed me a beer. Handed one to Chloe. Pulled a juice box from behind his back and presented it to Emma with a formal bow, and Emma accepted it with a giggle and a curtsy that she performed while balancing on one foot, which was more graceful than it had any right to be.

Dollie appeared from the kitchen carrying plates, followed by the smell of food that had been cooking all day. She had been busy. A spread was laid out on the table that rivaled anything Chloe had ever brought to the mill. Roasted chicken. Mashed potatoes. Corn on the cob. Green beans. Biscuits. A pie that was cooling on the counter, golden and perfect, the kind of pie that you make when you have good news to celebrate and you want the food to match the feeling.

“I have been cooking since nine this morning,” Dollie said, setting the last plate down. “So someone better tell me we won.”

“Twenty-five years,” I said. “No parole.”

Dollie closed her eyes. Her hands went to the edge of the table and she gripped it, steadying herself, and when she opened her eyes they were bright with the tears she had been holding since the morning, the tears of a woman who had loved Chloe since they were fourteen and had spent years watching her friend suffer and had finally, today, seen the thing that caused the suffering put behind a locked door.

“Good,” she said. Her voice was fierce. Certain. “Good.”

She loaded the table with food. Every plate. Every bowl. Every dish she had made with her own hands while waiting for the call that would tell her the outcome. We sat down, all of us. Josh at the head. Dollie beside him. Chloe and me on the other side with Emma between us, Captain Fluffington wedged into a chair of his own because Emma insisted he needed a seat at the table.

We ate. We drank. Josh told a joke that was not funny and everyone laughed anyway because the laughter was not about the joke. It was about the relief. It was about the knowledge that the man who had terrorized this family was behind bars and would stay behind bars for a quarter of a century and that tomorrow morning, and every morning after that, Chloe would wake up without the weight of his shadow on her life.

Emma drank her juice and ate her chicken and told Captain Fluffington about the trial in terms that a stuffed bear would understand, which mostly involved descriptions of the courthouse as a very big building where bad people go to get in trouble.

Dollie refilled plates. Josh refilled glasses. Chloe leaned against me, her head on my shoulder, her hand on my thigh under the table, and I held my beer and looked at the people around this table and felt something I had not felt in a very long time.

Victory.

Not the kind that comes from defeating an enemy. The kind that comes from protecting the people you love and seeing them safe and fed and laughing and whole. The kind that does not require violence or force or the skills I had learned in the military. The kind that requires only presence, and patience, and the stubborn refusal to let the world take what belongs to you.

“To Emma,” Josh said, raising his beer.

“To Emma,” we all said.

Emma raised her juice box. “To Captain Fluffington.”

We drank to that too.

The night wound down slowly. The food disappeared. The beer ran low. Emma fell asleep on the couch between Captain Fluffington and Sir Chomps-a-Lot, her mouth slightly open, her cast propped on a pillow that Dollie had positioned with the precision of a woman who took her godmother duties very seriously.

I carried her to the car when it was time to go. Chloe walked beside me, her hand on Emma’s back, and the weight of my sleeping daughter in my arms felt like the weight of everything I had fought for. Light and heavy at the same time. The most important thing I had ever carried.

We drove home in silence. Not the empty kind. The kind that comes from a day so full of feeling that there are no words left, only the quiet gratitude of people who have survived something and come out whole on the other side.

Tomorrow would be a normal day. The mill. The school. Dinner at the table. The routine of a family living its life without looking over its shoulder.

I was ready for normal. After everything we had been through, after the war and the loss and the separation and the violence and the long road back to each other, normal was not boring. Normal was the prize. Normal was the thing you fight for when you have seen enough chaos to know what peace is worth.

I had never wanted anything more.

38

CHLOE

Ifell asleep on my desk.

I did not mean to. The plan had been straightforward. Stay late. Finish grading the stack of papers that had been growing on the corner of my desk like a small, accusatory mountain. Go home. But somewhere between the fourteenth spelling test and the seventeenth, somewhere between circling a misspelled “butterfly” and writing “Great job!” in green marker for the sixth time, my head had found its way to my folded arms and my eyes had closed and the world had gone soft and dark and warm.

Teaching had consumed me in the best way possible. The classroom was mine now, twenty small desks arranged in a U-shape because I believed children should be able to see each other’s faces, a reading corner with pillows and a bookshelf that the kids helped organize every Friday, a wall of artwork that changed weekly and that I photographed every time because every drawing was a masterpiece and I refused to let any of them be forgotten.

The work was endless. Lesson plans and progress reports and parent conferences and the constant, beautiful, exhausting energy of twenty five-year-olds who needed everything from you every minute of the day and gave everything back in the form of hugs and questions and sticky-fingered artwork. I loved it with a ferocity that surprised me. I had known I missed teaching. I had not known how much until I was back in it, standing in front of a room full of children, being the person who helped them take their first steps into the world of words and numbers and wonder.