Page 50 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

Tomorrow, I would be brave.

18

SAWYER

Two weeks.

Two weeks of Chloe Matthews and Emma Matthews living in my cabin, filling it with sounds and smells and a particular kind of chaos that I hadn’t known a life could contain. Two weeks of small shoes by the door and wildflowers in water glasses and a stuffed dinosaur that had somehow migrated to the couch like it paid rent. Two weeks of breakfast together and dinner together and the quiet hours between, when Emma drew pictures at my workbench and Chloe graded papers she’d started taking remotely for a tutoring service and I pretended to read while actually watching them both.

My foot was healing. The crutches were down to one, used more out of habit than necessity. The doctor had cleared me for light activity, which I’d interpreted as permission to return to the mill, which Chloe had interpreted as a personal attack on her authority as my caretaker.

“Light activity means walking to the mailbox,” she’d said, blocking the front door with her body. “Not operating heavy machinery.”

“I’ve operated that machinery with worse injuries.”

“That’s not the flex you think it is, Sawyer.”

I’d stayed home. Not because she’d convinced me. Because Emma had looked up from her drawing and said, “Stay, Uncle Sawyer. Please. I want to show you my new dinosaur,” and the way she’d said it, quiet and certain, like my presence in this cabin was something she counted on now, had nailed my feet to the floor.

She’d been doing that more and more. Pulling me into her world with the casual confidence of a child who had decided I belonged there. She showed me her drawings. She asked me to read to her. She sat next to me at meals and told me facts about dinosaurs with the intensity of a professor delivering a lecture. She held my hand when we walked to the woodshop, her small fingers wrapped around two of mine, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

And the thing that kept hitting me, the thing that made my chest tight in a way I couldn’t explain, was how easy it felt. How right. As if this kid and I were tuned to the same frequency, as if something in her recognized something in me and had simply decided, without fuss or hesitation, that we fit.

Today, I’d left the cabin. Not for the mill. For the market. Because Emma had mentioned, exactly once, in passing, while arranging her dinosaur figurines on the windowsill, that she missed pizza. “The real kind, Uncle Sawyer. With the stretchy cheese.”

I’d driven to town, walked into Mabel’s with my one crutch and my wallet, and ordered a large pepperoni with extra cheese. Mabel had looked at me like I’d grown a second head, because in seven years of patronage, I had never once ordered a pizza. I’d ordered coffee, black, no sugar. That was my standing order. That was my entire relationship with Mabel’s establishment.

“For the kid,” I said, and left it at that.

Mabel had smiled in a way that suggested she was already composing the gossip she’d share with Mrs. Patterson within the hour.

I pulled up to the cabin with the pizza box balanced on the passenger seat, and Emma was out the door before I’d killed the engine. She ran across the yard, braids flying, and when she saw the box through the window, the sound she made was the kind of high-frequency squeal that only dogs and six-year-olds can produce.

“Pizza!” She bounced on her toes while I got out. “Uncle Sawyer, you got pizza!”

I held the box up and she grabbed it with both hands, staggering slightly under its size, and carried it into the cabin like she was bearing a sacred artifact. I followed on my crutch, and the sound of Emma’s excitement echoed off the walls.

Chloe was in the kitchen, her hair up, an apron I didn’t know I owned tied around her waist. She looked at the pizza box, then at me, and something crossed her face. Not surprise. Something softer, more complicated. The look of a woman watching a man do something small and specific for a child, and understanding exactly what it meant.

We ate at the table. Emma had pizza sauce on her chin and both cheeks within the first two bites, and she didn’t care. She ate with the unself-conscious joy of a kid who had been promised nothing and given everything, and between bites she narrated a complicated story about a dinosaur who opened a pizza restaurant in space.

Chloe watched her daughter. I watched them both.

“Sawyer,” Chloe said, wiping her mouth with a napkin. Her voice had shifted. Lighter, casual, but with an undercurrent of something I’d learned to recognize, the careful tone she used when she was approaching a subject sideways. “Don’t you have a girlfriend? I mean, someone who might not love our arrangement here?”

I looked at her. “You know I don’t have a girlfriend.”

“I don’t know that. It’s been seven years. A lot can happen.”

“Not to me. Nothing happened to me.” The words came out flatter than I intended. “I don’t like having a girlfriend. I especially don’t like having a girlfriend if she’s going to be talkative.” I paused. “The only exception I ever considered was a specific talkative girl I met at my sawmill who couldn’t take a hint.”

The color climbed her cheeks. Fast, vivid, impossible to hide.

“But she’s the one who forgot me,” I said. “So.”

“I didn’t forget you,” she said, defensive, the words coming quick. “I didn’t have anyone for years after you. Not until… before the marriage.”

The marriage. The word sat between us like a stone. I looked at my pizza. Looked at Emma, who was happily oblivious, constructing a tower out of pizza crusts. Looked at Chloe.