Page 44 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

The monitor beeped. Emma breathed. The fluorescent light buzzed overhead.

“He hit her,” I said. “Emma. She was four. She spilled juice on his campaign papers and he hit her across the face. And that was the end. I had her in the car within the hour. Filed for divorce the next morning. Spent two years fighting his family’s lawyers. Two years of restraining orders that his father’s connections made useless. Two years of moving apartments, of looking over my shoulder, of running.”

I was sobbing now, quietly, my shoulders shaking, my hands pressed over my mouth to muffle the sound so I wouldn’t wake Emma. Everything I’d held together, the kindergarten-teacher calm, the brave face, the I’m-fine-we’re-fine-everything-is-fine armor, all of it was on the floor of this hospital room.

“The divorce just got approved. I thought it was over. Then his men showed up at my apartment, and I grabbed Emma and ran again, and Dollie picked us up, and we drove here because I didn’t know where else to go. Because I ran out of places to run.”

The silence that followed was enormous. Sawyer was still. His jaw was tight. His hands were gripping the hospital blanket on his lap, the knuckles white, and I could see the muscle working in his temple. Something was burning behind his eyes, barely contained, and I couldn’t tell if it was rage or grief or both.

When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet and careful and shaking with the effort of keeping whatever was underneath it from breaking through.

“I don’t know where I should be hurt the most,” he said. “That you were unsafe for years and I didn’t know. Or that you married another man.”

Something about the way he said it, so raw, so honest, so impossibly Sawyer, the man who couldn’t sugarcoat a compliment to save his life, cut through the heaviness like a blade of light.

I reached over and slapped his injured foot.

Not hard. Just enough to make contact, to break the tension, to do the thing that my body chose to do before my brain could intervene.

He flinched, sucked in a breath through his teeth, and then his face did something I almost didn’t recognize. The tight jaw loosened. The hard line of his mouth softened. And a small, reluctant smile appeared, barely there, fighting against every instinct he had to hold it back, but present. Real.

“You just hit an injured man,” he said.

“You deserved it.”

“I’m in a hospital bed.”

“And you said something ridiculous while I was crying, so we’re even.”

The smile held for another second. Then it faded, but the warmth behind it stayed, settling into his eyes and softening the sharp edges. He looked at me, really looked at me, with an expression that held pain and tenderness and something stubborn and unbreakable that had survived seven years of silence.

“Both,” he said, quieter. “The answer is both. I’m hurt about both. But right now, the thing that matters is that you and that little girl are safe. So you’re staying at the cabin. End of discussion.”

I wiped my face. Sniffed. Tried to pull myself back together and only partially succeeded.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay?”

“Okay. We’ll stay at the cabin.”

He nodded. The tension in his shoulders released by a fraction, and he leaned back against the pillows with the exhaustion of a man who had been shot, operated on, and emotionally gutted in the span of a single afternoon.

“You should sleep,” I said. “The doctor said rest.”

“The doctor talks too much.”

“The doctor is right and you know it.”

He looked at Emma again. Her sleeping face, peaceful and trusting, her hand still resting on his bed railing. He studied her for a long moment, and I watched him watching her and held my breath, waiting for the question, the one about the math, the one about her eyes.

It didn’t come. Not yet.

“You’ll be here in the morning?” he asked instead.

The question was simple. The weight of it was not. Will you be here. Not will you come back, not are you staying. Will you be here. As if the thing he feared most, the thing seven years had taught him to expect, was waking up and finding me gone.

“I’ll be here,” I said. “I promise.”