Page 35 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

And she’d left.

Just like that. Without a word, without a fight, without letting me say the thing I needed to say: that Rachel was nobody, that it was over years ago, that the only person I wanted standing on my porch, in my kitchen, in my bed, was her. Was always, only, devastatingly her.

I sat in the truck until Josh found me.

He opened the passenger door and got in without asking, the way Josh did everything, by simply inserting himself into situations whether you wanted him there or not. He had a look on his face that told me Dollie had already called him, and Dollie had been Chloe’s friend before she was Josh’s girlfriend, which meant the information network had already activated.

“I heard,” Josh said.

I said nothing.

“Sawyer. Talk to me.”

“About what.”

“About the fact that you look like someone just hit you with one of our logs.”

“I’m fine.”

“You are the opposite of fine. You’ve been sitting in your truck for forty minutes.”

I looked at him. He looked back. Steady, patient, annoyingly persistent.

That night, I ended up at Murphy’s. Not because I’d planned to, not because I’d made a conscious decision to walk into a bar and drink until the edges of the world went soft. It just happened. The way falling happens. You’re standing, and then you’re not, and the ground meets you with a certainty that feels like it was always going to end this way.

Josh came. Danny came. Even Marcus from the lumber yard came, though I hadn’t spoken more than ten words to him in three years. They sat around a table in the back corner and they let me drink, not because they thought it was a good idea, but because they knew that trying to stop me was a project with no budget and no timeline.

The whiskey burned. Good. I wanted it to burn. I wanted something external to match the inferno happening inside me, because the alternative was sitting with the silent, airless devastation that had taken up residence in my chest the moment her car had pulled away.

“Why?” I said after the fourth glass. The word came out cracked. “Why didn’t she let me explain?”

Josh was quiet.

“I would have explained. It was nothing. Rachel is nothing. She showed up out of nowhere, she was lying, she was never my girlfriend, and Chloe just… left. She didn’t even look at me. She just walked past me like I was already gone.”

My hand tightened around the glass. The whiskey caught the bar light and turned amber and gold, and the color reminded me of string lights reflected in blue eyes, and I set the glass down hard enough to make it ring.

“Why did she leave just like that?” My voice was rising and I couldn’t stop it. “I opened up to her. I told her about Jimmy. I told her things I haven’t told anyone in ten years. I let her in. I let her all the way in, and the first, the very first time something looks wrong, she runs? Without a conversation? Without giving me thirty seconds to tell her the truth?”

The table was quiet. Josh’s hand was on his beer, unmoving. Danny was staring at the table. Marcus was very interested in his napkin.

“Why now?” The question came out like it had been torn from me, ragged and raw and bleeding. “Why now, when I finally let myself… when I finally…”

I couldn’t finish the sentence. Because finishing it meant saying the word, and the word was too big and too new and too wrapped up in a woman who was somewhere on a highway getting farther away with every second.

“When you finally let yourself fall,” Josh said quietly.

I looked at him. He looked back. No judgment. No pity. Just the steady understanding of a man who had seen me at my worst and hadn’t left.

“Yeah,” I said, and the word cost me everything.

I drank until Murphy started giving Josh the look that said “get him home before I have to,” and Josh drove me to the cabin, and I fell into the bed that still smelled like her and slept the black, dreamless sleep of a man who had run out of things to feel.

The next morning was brutal. Hangover brutal. The kind of headache that makes you understand why ancient civilizations thought pain was punishment from the gods. I showered, dressed, and drove to the mill because the mill was the only thing that had never left me.

Dollie was waiting.

She was standing by the gate, her red hair bright against the gray morning, her arms crossed and her face set in the expression she wore when she was trying to be diplomatic but was considering violence. She saw my truck and walked toward it with a purpose that made two of my crew members step out of her path.