Page 33 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

I pressed my palms to my eyes and breathed.

“What are you doing at my boyfriend’s cabin?”

The voice came from below the porch. Sharp, high, and loaded with the kind of possessive accusation that cuts before you even understand you’ve been hit.

I dropped my hands and looked down.

She was standing at the bottom of the porch steps. Tall, dark-haired, with the kind of angular beauty that photographs well and a mouth set in a line that said she was not here to make friends. She was wearing a fitted jacket, expensive boots, and an expression that could have flash-frozen the puddles in the yard.

“Boyfriend?” I repeated. The word tasted wrong.

“Sawyer.” She said his name like she owned it. “He is my boyfriend. Has been for a while now, but I’m guessing he didn’t mention that. They usually don’t.”

The cabin door opened behind me. Sawyer stepped out, pulling a shirt over his head, his hair still sleep-tousled, and the woman’s face lit up like someone had plugged her in. She moved up the steps, fast and certain, and threaded her arm through his like she was completing a circuit.

“Baby,” she said, pressing against his side. “I came by last night but you weren’t answering your phone. I figured you were at the mill.”

Sawyer’s face was doing something complicated. His eyes were on me, not on her, and there was something in them that looked like panic, the kind of panic that comes from two worlds colliding that were never supposed to meet.

“Chloe,” he started.

I held up my hand.

Everything inside me, the warmth, the tenderness, the raw and precious thing that had opened up between us in this cabin last night, it all went cold. Ice cold. The kind of cold that doesn’t hurt yet because the nerve endings haven’t caught up, and when they do, the pain will be unimaginable.

“I have to go,” I said.

“Chloe, wait. This isn’t…”

“I have to go.”

I walked down the steps. Past her. Past him. Past whatever explanation he was trying to assemble, past whatever truth or lie was forming behind those green eyes that I had been foolish enough to trust. I walked across the wet yard to where my car was still parked from yesterday, my bare feet hitting cold gravel, and I didn’t look back.

“Chloe!” His voice followed me, raw and urgent.

I got in the car. Started the engine. Drove.

The tears didn’t come until I was three blocks away, and when they did, they came like the storm last night, sudden and total and without mercy. I pulled over on a side street and pressed my forehead to the steering wheel and sobbed so hard my ribs ached. For my mother. For Sawyer. For the beautiful, stupid, reckless thing I’d let myself feel and the brutal efficiency with which it had been destroyed.

I cried until there was nothing left. Then I wiped my face, blew my nose on a napkin from the glove compartment, and drove home.

At my apartment, I moved on autopilot. I called the school and spoke to Mrs. Brennan. “I need to resign. Immediately. Family emergency. My mother is… she’s very sick.” Mrs. Brennan, who had seen everything in thirty years but had never heard my voice sound like this, said she understood and wished me strength.

I packed. Not carefully, not thoughtfully, just the essentials shoved into bags with the mechanical efficiency of someone who has decided that speed is the only thing standing between them and a complete breakdown. Clothes. Documents. The photo of my parents on the bookshelf. The paperback novel on my nightstand that I’d never finish.

I didn’t pack the throw pillows. I didn’t pack the string lights. Those belonged to a woman who had time for small joys, and that woman was gone.

My phone buzzed. Sawyer. Again. I declined the call. It buzzed again. Declined. Again. Declined. I turned off the phone and put it in the bottom of my bag.

By noon, the apartment was empty of everything that mattered. I left the key on the counter, closed the door, and loaded the car.

The drive to the hospital took three and a half hours. I made it in three, because the speed limit was a suggestion and the highway was empty and I needed to be somewhere that wasn’t here.

St. Catherine’s was a large gray building with too much glass and not enough warmth. The oncology wing was on the fourth floor, and the elevator smelled like antiseptic and the particular brand of artificial calm that hospitals pump through their ventilation systems. Room 412. The door was open.

My mother was in the bed.

She looked smaller. That was the first thing I noticed, the terrible, gutting wrongness of it. Helen Matthews, who had filled every room she’d ever walked into with her voice and her laughter and her absolute certainty that life was worth celebrating, looked small in that bed. The hospital gown hung loose on her shoulders. Her skin had a grayish cast that the fluorescent lights made worse. But her eyes, when they found me in the doorway, were the same. Warm and brown and full of a love so fierce it could have powered cities.