Page 49 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

His chest was right there. Broad, scarred, mapped with muscle and the evidence of a life lived hard. I’d seen it before. I’d touched it before. I’d traced those scars with my fingertips in the warm, rain-washed dark of this very cabin. But that was seven years ago, and we were different people now, and I was not going to stand in his bathroom and stare at him like a woman who hadn’t moved on, even though I hadn’t moved on, which was the whole problem.

“As if you haven’t seen any of this before,” he said from behind me.

“Shut up, Sawyer.”

I heard the low, rough sound that I recognized as a laugh. Not the full laugh from yesterday on the lawn, but its quieter cousin, the one that came through his chest instead of his throat. I kept my back turned, my face burning, and stared at the bathroom wall with an intensity usually reserved for solving complex mathematical equations.

“I’m getting in,” he said. “You can look.”

I didn’t look until I heard the water running and the shower curtain pulled. I helped him adjust the stool, handed him soap and shampoo through the gap in the curtain, and stood guard in case anything went catastrophically wrong. The steam filled the small room and fogged the mirror, and I tried very hard not to think about the shape of him behind the curtain, the water running over skin I knew the geography of.

“Shampoo,” he said, and his hand came through the curtain, palm up.

I placed it in his hand. Our fingers touched. I pulled back like I’d been burned.

“You’re jumpy,” he observed.

“I’m efficient. There’s a difference. Are you done?”

“Almost.”

I waited in the hallway while he dried off and dressed. When he emerged, damp-haired and smelling like soap and cedar, he looked at me with an expression that was almost, almost, amused.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome. Next time you can fall and crack your head open for all I care.”

“There she is,” he said, and the softness in his voice caught me off guard.

I fled to the kitchen.

At lunch, the cabin transformed. Emma had decided that mealtimes were her domain, and she arranged the table with the exacting standards of a tiny restaurant manager, napkins folded into triangles, glasses aligned, silverware straight. She put a wildflower she’d picked from the yard in a water glass at the center and stood back to admire her work.

“This is the fanciest meal I’ve ever served,” she announced.

I’d made sandwiches. They were not fancy. But Emma’s presentation elevated them to something that felt almost ceremonial, and when we sat down, the three of us at the table, it felt like something more than lunch.

Sawyer told stories.

I don’t know what unlocked it. Maybe it was Emma’s face, the way she looked at him with the complete attention of a child who has decided that someone is worth listening to. Maybe it was the lunch, the normalcy of it, the strange and terrifying domesticity of sharing sandwiches with a woman he’d loved and lost and a child he didn’t know was his. Whatever it was, Sawyer talked more at that meal than I’d heard him talk in the entire time I’d known him.

He told Emma about the sawmill. About the time a log rolled off the stack and chased Danny across the yard like a scene from a cartoon. About the morning Josh accidentally turned on the wrong saw and cut a perfectly good table in half, then tried to glue it back together before Sawyer noticed. About the delivery driver who was so afraid of Sawyer’s glare that he left the lumber in the wrong yard and didn’t come back for three days.

Emma laughed until she couldn’t breathe. She had tears streaming down her face, her sandwich forgotten, her whole body shaking with the kind of laughter that is contagious and unstoppable. She laughed so hard she fell off her chair, which made her laugh harder, and Sawyer looked down at her on the floor and his face did the thing.

The thing where the hard lines softened. Where the jaw unclenched and the eyes warmed and the mouth forgot to be a straight line. He didn’t smile, not fully, but the ghost of it was there, and it was directed at Emma, and it was the most beautiful almost-smile I had ever seen.

“More,” Emma gasped from the floor. “Tell me more.”

And he did. He sat at the table in the cabin he’d built with his own hands, telling stories to a girl he didn’t know was his daughter, and the sound of her laughter filled the spaces that had been empty for seven years.

I watched them and thought: he deserves to know.

He deserves to know, and the longer I wait, the worse it will be, and the guilt I’m carrying is nothing compared to the guilt I’ll carry if I let this go on.

But not today. Today, the cabin was full of laughter and sandwiches and a girl with green eyes who had already decided that Uncle Sawyer was the most interesting person she’d ever met.

Today was enough.