Page 43 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

“Chloe, I need to tell you something.”

My stomach dropped. “Sawyer…”

“I know you’re going to try to stop me. And I’m asking you to let me finish.”

“You don’t have to do this. Not tonight. You’re hurt, you’re in a hospital bed, you just got shot…”

“Please.”

The word stopped me cold. Sawyer Cole did not say please. Not in the months I’d known him. Not when I’d brought him soup or invaded his sawmill or pushed past every wall he’d built. Please was a word that required vulnerability, and vulnerability was a language he didn’t speak. Hearing it now, quiet and stripped bare, in a hospital room with my daughter asleep between us, cracked something open in my chest.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m listening.”

He shifted against the pillows, wincing when the movement pulled at his foot. His green eyes found mine and held them.

“Rachel Winters. The woman on the porch that morning. She was not my girlfriend.” He said it plainly, without drama, the way he said everything that mattered. Like facts. Like wood grain. Like things that simply were. “She was someone I dated for three months, two years before I met you. I ended it. She moved to Denver. I hadn’t spoken to her since. She showed up that morning out of nowhere. I don’t know why. Maybe she heard I’d been seen with someone and her ego couldn’t take it. Maybe she wanted to cause exactly what she caused. I don’t know, and I don’t care.”

“Sawyer, you really don’t have to…”

“I’m not done.”

I pressed my lips together. My hands were clasped in my lap, my knuckles white, and I was concentrating very hard on the floor tiles because looking at his face while he said these things was more than I could handle.

“I am not saying this to expect anything,” he said, and his voice dropped to that low, bedrock register that I remembered from the nights when he’d said the things that mattered most. “I just want you to know. I need you to hear my side. Not because it changes anything. Not because I think it earns me something. The truth just deserves to exist, even if it doesn’t fix what it broke.”

The floor tiles blurred. I blinked hard and kept my eyes down.

“I never had another girlfriend after you,” he said. “Not one. Not a date, not a conversation, not a look at another woman that lasted longer than a second. Seven years, Chloe. Seven years of nothing but work and silence and a cabin that still smelled like you for months after you left.”

I bit the inside of my cheek so hard I tasted copper. Do not cry. Do not cry. He is telling you the truth and you owe him the respect of hearing it without falling apart.

“I won’t ask you why you left,” he continued. “I know some of it now. About your mother. And I’m guessing there’s more. I’m not asking for an explanation or an apology.” He paused. “I’m just glad you’re hearing my side. That’s all I wanted.”

The silence that followed filled the room. The monitor beeped. Emma shifted in her sleep, mumbling something about dinosaurs. I stared at my hands and willed my eyes to stay dry and failed, one tear escaping down my cheek before I could catch it. I wiped it fast with the back of my hand, hoping he didn’t see.

He saw. He always saw.

But he didn’t comment on it. Instead, his voice shifted, the emotional rawness pulling back to make room for something more practical. More controlled.

“We can talk about the rest another time,” he said. “But right now, I think you and Emma should stay at my cabin.”

I looked up. “There’s no need for that. We’re staying at Dollie’s. We can visit you from time to time while your foot heals, help out, bring food…”

“Chloe.” The steel was back. That immovable, mountain-granite certainty that I remembered from a man who had never once been talked out of a decision once he’d made it. “This is not about me. This is not about us or what happened or what didn’t happen. This is about you and your daughter and the fact that a man with a gun attacked her today in a parking lot. This was not some accident, Chloe. This was targeted. Someone sent that man. Which means someone knows where you are, and someone will send another.”

The words landed like stones in my stomach.

“Is there something you’re running from?” he asked.

And the dam broke.

Not slowly, not gracefully, not the composed, controlled tears of a woman who had her life together. I broke the way you break when you’ve been holding the pieces together with sheer willpower for years and someone finally asks the right question in the right voice at the right moment and the glue just gives.

“His name is Jonathan Perry,” I said, and my voice came out ragged and wet and shaking. “Mayor’s son. I married him after my mother died because I was broken and lonely and he was there and he seemed kind and I couldn’t tell the difference between love and loneliness anymore.”

Sawyer’s face didn’t change. His eyes didn’t leave mine. He listened the way he always listened, with his whole body, like my words were the most important sounds in the room.

“He was good at first. He accepted Emma. He played with her, called her princess.” I wiped my face with both hands and it didn’t help because the tears kept coming. “Then he changed. After the wedding, something shifted. He got possessive. Controlling. He monitored my phone, decided what I wore, told me which parents I could talk to at Emma’s school. He turned affection into a reward system and silence into punishment, and the space I was allowed to exist in got smaller and smaller.”