Page 47 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

“I have never heard you laugh,” Chloe said, and her voice had gone soft in a way that was dangerous. Dangerous to me. Dangerous to the walls I was supposed to be keeping up.

“Don’t get used to it,” I said, getting to my feet with the crutches and significantly less dignity than I’d started the day with.

She helped me up the steps. Her hand on my arm was firm and businesslike, and she did not look at me while she did it, which told me she was feeling everything and showing nothing. I knew the strategy. I’d invented it.

Inside the cabin, Emma gasped. She ran to the bookshelf, to the window, to the woodstove. She touched everything with her fingertips, light and reverent, like the cabin was a museum of wonders. When she found the workshop in the back, with the half-finished furniture and the tools hanging on their pegs, she turned to me with an expression of pure awe.

“You build things?” she asked.

“I do.”

“Can you build me a dinosaur?”

“I can try.”

The smile she gave me was so bright it physically hurt. Not in the way pain usually hurt. In a different way. In the way that a door opening after years of being closed hurts, the rush of air and light into a space that had forgotten what those things felt like.

Dollie left within the hour, hugging Chloe tight and whispering something in her ear that made Chloe nod and blink fast. She hugged Emma, told her to take care of “these two disasters,” and turned to me at the door.

“Take care of them,” she said.

“They’re supposed to be taking care of me,” I said, gesturing at the crutches. “That’s the arrangement.”

Dollie gave me a look that communicated approximately seventeen different things, all of them some variation of “you know exactly what I mean, Sawyer Cole, don’t you dare play dumb with me.” Then she got in her car and drove away, and it was just the three of us.

Chloe cooked dinner. She moved around my kitchen with the same easy competence she’d had seven years ago, finding things in cabinets I’d barely opened, humming under her breath while the pasta water boiled. The cabin filled with the smell of garlic and tomatoes, the same smell from that night, the first night she’d cooked for me, and the memory was so sharp it felt like touching a blade.

Emma set the table. She found three plates, three forks, three glasses, and arranged them with geometric precision. Then she sat in the chair nearest mine and looked up at me.

“Thank you for saving me,” she said. Quiet. Serious. The playfulness from the car ride was gone, replaced by something older. “The bad man was scary. But you were scarier.”

“I wasn’t scary,” I said.

“You were to him.” She looked at her hands on the table, small and precise. “Nobody ever fought for me before. Except Mama. But she’s small.”

The words landed in a place inside me that I didn’t know still had feeling. I looked at this girl, this fierce, careful, extraordinary girl who lined up her shoes and named her dinosaur and had my eyes and her mother’s courage, and the thing I’d been feeling since the parking lot, the pull, the recognition, the tethering, tightened into something that felt permanent.

“Well,” I said, “now someone has.”

Emma smiled. And Chloe, standing at the stove with her back to us, went very still.

We ate dinner together. The three of us, at a table built for two, in a cabin that had been built for one. And for the first time in seven years, the silence in the room wasn’t empty.

It was full.

17

CHLOE

Iwoke up to the sound of my daughter’s laughter.

It came from the main room, muffled by the bedroom door but unmistakable. Emma’s laugh was a specific, identifiable thing, a bright, bubbling sound that started in her belly and rose through her like champagne. I hadn’t heard it enough in the past two years. The running, the hiding, the constant watchfulness had turned my daughter into a child who smiled carefully and laughed rarely. Hearing it now, free and full and ringing through the cabin like a bell, made my throat close.

I lay in bed for a moment, listening. Under Emma’s laughter was the low rumble of a voice. Deep. Quiet. Speaking in a cadence that I knew intimately, the careful, measured way a man talks when he’s not used to talking and is trying very hard to get it right.

I got up, pulled on a sweater, and opened the bedroom door.

They were on the couch.