Page 26 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

“Then take better care of yourself.”

“I was taking care of myself. I walked to the pharmacy.”

“You almost collapsed on the sidewalk.”

“I had it under control.”

He turned around, the dish towel over his shoulder, and looked at me with an expression that said he had very strong opinions about my definition of “under control.” But he didn’t argue. He just hung the towel on the oven handle, walked to the couch, and sat down beside me.

“Next time,” he said, not looking at me, his eyes fixed on some point across the room. “Just call. I’ll come.”

I leaned my head against his shoulder. He didn’t pull away.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll call.”

We sat like that until I fell asleep, his shoulder solid under my cheek, his breathing steady as a metronome, and somewhere in the space between waking and sleep, I felt his hand find mine under the blanket and hold on.

9

SAWYER

She was sitting at my workbench again.

Not the office chair. Not the lumber stack where normal visitors would wait. My workbench. The one in the back of the mill where I did detail work, the surface scarred with years of blade marks and stained with wood oil. She had her legs crossed under her, a stack of kindergarten evaluations on her lap, a red pen in her hand, and a look of concentration on her face that made it clear she’d completely forgotten she was in a sawmill and not a living room.

I watched her for a moment before she noticed me. The way her lips moved when she read. The way she tapped the pen against her chin when she was thinking. The way she’d circled a word on one of the papers and written something in the margin with a careful, looping hand that probably made her students feel like every correction was a compliment.

She’d been doing this for weeks now. Showing up at the mill after school, parking herself somewhere in my workspace, grading papers or reading or just talking at me while I worked. She brought cookies sometimes. Coffee other times. Once she’d brought a Bluetooth speaker and played what she called “sawmill ambiance music,” which turned out to be bluegrass, and I’d let it play for twenty minutes before I realized I was tapping my foot and shut it off.

She looked up. The concentration broke into a smile so immediate and warm that my chest did the thing it always did. The involuntary tightening. The Pavlovian response to Chloe Matthews’s face that I had stopped pretending I could control.

“Hey, grumpy,” she said. “I’m almost done with Marcus’s evaluation. He spelled his name with a backwards S and I need to figure out how to phrase ‘creative interpretation of the alphabet’ without his mother calling me.”

“My workbench is not a desk.”

“It’s a flat surface. All flat surfaces are potential desks. That’s basic physics.”

“That’s not physics.”

“Then it’s basic Chloe logic, which is equally valid.”

The sky had been darkening all afternoon, clouds piling up over the mountains in thick, bruised layers that promised nothing good. I’d been watching them between tasks, calculating how much time we had before the rain hit. Mountain storms didn’t negotiate. They arrived without warning and left without apology, and this one looked like it had a personal grudge against anyone stupid enough to be outdoors.

“You should head out,” I said, checking the sky through the mill’s open bay doors. “Storm’s coming.”

“Five more minutes. I just need to finish this page.”

“Chloe.”

“Three minutes.”

“Now.”

She looked up at me with those blue eyes, and I saw the exact moment she decided to ignore my tone and smile at me instead. “You know, the growly voice doesn’t work on me anymore. It just makes you sound like a bear who hasn’t had his coffee.”

The rain hit before I could respond.

Not a gradual build. Not a warning sprinkle followed by the main event. One second the air was dry, the next, a wall of water came down so hard and so fast that the sound on the metal roof was like a thousand drummers hitting at once. The bay doors let in a sheet of sideways rain that soaked the first three feet of floor within seconds.