Page 34 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

“There’s my girl,” she said, and smiled.

I made it three steps before my legs gave out. My dad caught me. He was there, solid and steady, his arms coming around me the way they had when I was small and the world was too big and too loud, and I buried my face in his chest and cried everything out. For Mom. For the future that had just been rewritten in language I wasn’t ready to read. For the man in the cabin and the life I’d been building and the way it had all shattered in the space of a single morning.

“I’m here,” I said, pulling back, wiping my face, finding my voice. “I’m here and I’m not leaving.”

My mother reached for my hand. I took it. Her fingers were thinner than I remembered, but her grip was strong.

“Don’t you dare look at me like that, Chloe Rose Matthews,” she said, and there it was, the fire. Dimmed but not extinguished. “This is a fight, not a funeral. We don’t do funerals in this family until we’ve exhausted every other option.”

I laughed. It came out wet and broken and not very convincing, but it was a laugh, and my mother squeezed my hand and smiled at me, and I decided right then that Sawyer Cole was a chapter that was over. A mistake I would learn from. A beautiful, painful, irreversible mistake that I would fold up and put away in the part of my heart where things that hurt too much to keep out in the open go to live in the dark.

I squeezed her hand back and said, “Tell me everything.”

And I stayed.

12

SAWYER

Idrove to her apartment.

The truck ate the distance between the sawmill and Maple Street in under four minutes, which meant I was going too fast, which meant I didn’t care. The engine growled through the turns and the tires barked on the wet asphalt and my hands were white-knuckled on the wheel, gripping it hard enough to feel the stitching through my skin.

I’d called her nine times. Nine. I’d counted each one, each ring that went on and on before dropping to voicemail, each silence on the other end that felt like a door slamming shut. By the sixth call, the phone wasn’t even ringing. She’d turned it off.

The apartment building looked the same. The old elm tree. The front steps. The door that I’d stood outside of a month and a half ago, pretending I was “just passing by,” pretending that I hadn’t driven across town specifically to stand near the building where she slept.

I took the stairs two at a time and knocked.

“Chloe.” I said her name through the door, loud enough for her to hear if she was on the other side, quiet enough not to bring the neighbors out. “Chloe, open the door. Please. Just let me explain.”

Nothing.

I knocked again. Harder. “Chloe.”

“She’s gone.”

The voice came from behind me. I turned. The woman from the apartment across the hall was standing in her doorway, a coffee mug in her hand and a bathrobe on her shoulders, looking at me with the sympathetic caution of someone delivering news they knew you didn’t want.

“What do you mean, gone?”

“Left. This morning. Packed her car and drove off. Said she wasn’t coming back.”

The hallway tilted.

“She left a key with me to give to the landlord,” the woman continued, taking a step back like she’d seen something in my face that warranted distance. “Said something about a family emergency. She was crying pretty hard, if that makes a difference.”

She wasn’t coming back.

I stood in that hallway and felt the ground crack open under my feet. Not the sudden, explosive fracture of a bomb on a dirt road, but the slow, grinding collapse of something structural, something that had been holding everything else up, and now it was gone and everything built on top of it was falling.

I drove back to the mill. I don’t remember the drive. One second I was standing in the hallway, the next I was sitting in my truck in the yard, staring at the steering wheel while the engine cooled and ticked in the silence.

I called her again. Voicemail. Called again. Voicemail. I typed a message, stared at it, deleted it. What was I supposed to say? How was I supposed to explain through a screen what I hadn’t been fast enough to explain in person?

Rachel Winters. That was the woman’s name. The woman who had shown up on my porch like a ghost from a life I’d already buried. We’d dated, if you could call it that, for three months two years ago. She’d wanted more than I was capable of giving, which was anything at all, and I’d ended it with the blunt efficiency that I ended everything. She’d moved to Denver. I hadn’t heard from her since. Until this morning, when she’d materialized on my porch, calling me baby, threading her arm through mine, performing a relationship that didn’t exist in front of the only woman who had ever mattered.

Chloe had seen that. She’d seen Rachel cling to me and call me her boyfriend, and she hadn’t stayed long enough to hear me deny it. She’d looked at me with those blue eyes, the same eyes that had looked at me with tenderness an hour before, and in them I’d seen something switch off. Something that had been open, warm, alive, clicking shut like a lock.