Page 112 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

“I love you,” I said. “More than I have ever loved anything. More than I thought I could love anything.”

She tilted her face up. Kissed my jaw. Settled back against my chest.

“Goodnight, future husband,” she said.

“Goodnight, future wife.”

She fell asleep first. I held her and watched the candles burn down to nothing, their flames flickering and finally dying, leaving only the moonlight and the warmth and the woman in my arms who had just agreed to spend her life with me.

I did not sleep for a long time. Not because I was restless. Because I wanted to stay in this moment. To memorize the weight of her against me. The sound of her breathing. The feel of the ring on her finger where her hand rested on my chest.

When I finally slept, I dreamed about the future. Not the vague, shapeless future I had feared for years. A specific one. A kitchen in the morning. Coffee and pancakes. Emma at the table. Chloe humming. A cabin that smelled like cedar and vanilla.

Home.

40

CHLOE

The dress was white.

Not the blinding, elaborate white of magazine covers and designer runway shows. A simple white. Soft and flowing and reaching the floor in a gentle cascade that moved when I moved, like water, like light, like something alive. It had thin straps and a neckline that was modest enough for a mountain wedding and low enough to make Sawyer forget how to breathe.

Dollie laced the back while I stood in front of the mirror in the small room at the back of the church and tried to remember how to be a person instead of a pile of emotions wearing a wedding dress.

“Stop shaking,” Dollie said.

“I am not shaking.”

“Your hands are doing a very good impression of it.”

“That is excitement. Not shaking.”

“Chloe Matthews. You are about to marry the love of your life in a church full of people who adore you. You are allowed to shake.”

She finished the laces and stepped back and looked at me in the mirror. Her eyes went bright. Her hand went to her chest. And the woman who had been my best friend since we were fourteen years old, who had driven through the night to save me, who had put a tracker in a necklace because she knew me well enough to plan for the worst, pressed her lips together and tried very hard not to cry.

“Oh,” she said. “Chloe.”

“Don’t,” I said. “If you cry, I will cry, and then my face will be ruined.”

“Your face could never be ruined.”

“Dollie.”

“You look like a dream. You look like the woman Sawyer Cole has been waiting for since the day he was born, which he was, even though he did not know it. You are going to walk down that aisle and that man is going to forget his own name.”

I turned from the mirror. Looked at her. This woman who had been beside me through everything. Through the good years and the dark years and the running and the returning and the rebuilding. Who had never once let go of my hand even when I tried to pull it away.

“Thank you,” I said. “For everything. Not just today. For all of it.”

“You can thank me by naming your next child after me.”

“We do not have a next child.”

“Yet.”

Emma appeared in the doorway. She was wearing a purple dress because she had refused to wear anything that was not purple, a negotiation that had lasted three days and that she had won decisively. Her hair was in braids with small white flowers woven through them, and her cast had been replaced with a walking boot that she had decorated with dinosaur stickers. She looked like a fairy tale character who had taken a detour through a natural history museum.