Page 51 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

And then the thing that had been nagging at the edges of my mind for two weeks, the thing I’d been circling without touching, the question that had been building since I’d first sat across a table from this kid and watched her line up her silverware with the same precise, measured care that I used when I aligned a saw blade, came to the surface and refused to go back down.

Emma.

Six years old. Born roughly seven months after Chloe left Pinewood Ridge. Green eyes. Dark, deep green. Pine-needle green. The same shade that looked back at me from the mirror every morning.

The math. The math I’d been avoiding. The math that had been sitting in plain sight, waiting for me to stop being afraid of the answer.

“Emma,” I said, and my voice was steady, because the soldier in me knew how to keep his voice steady even when the ground was collapsing. “Go to your room for a little bit, okay? There’s something important I need to talk to your mama about.”

Emma looked up from her crust tower. She glanced at me, then at Chloe, then back at me, and with the preternatural awareness of a child who had grown up in a house where adult conversations preceded bad things, she nodded.

“Okay,” she said quietly. She picked up Sir Chomps-a-Lot, slid off her chair, and walked to the guest room. The door closed with a soft click.

Chloe’s face had gone white.

Not pink. Not flushed. White. The kind of white that happens when all the blood leaves your face at once because your body is preparing for impact.

“What do you want to talk about?” she asked, and her voice was careful, controlled, the voice of a woman walking on ice and listening for cracks.

I looked at her across the table. The pizza between us, half-eaten. The wildflower in the water glass. The kitchen that smelled like her cooking and Emma’s laughter.

“Am I Emma’s father?”

The question entered the room and took all the air with it.

Chloe’s eyes filled. Not slowly, not with the gradual accumulation of emotion. All at once, like a dam giving way, and the tears spilled down her cheeks in a rush that she didn’t even try to stop.

“Chloe.” My voice was shaking now. The steadiness was gone. “Am I her father?”

She pressed her hands over her mouth. Her shoulders shook. The sound she made was muffled and broken, a sob that she was trying to swallow and couldn’t.

“Shit, Chloe.” The word came out raw, torn from somewhere deep. “That’s a yes. That’s a yes and you’re crying because you know what this means.”

She nodded. Small, jerky, behind her hands.

The room tilted. Not physically, not the way it had in the parking lot when the bullet hit. This was deeper. This was the axis of my entire life shifting, the fundamental understanding of who I was and what my world contained rotating on a point and settling into a new configuration that included a six-year-old girl with my eyes who had been calling me Uncle when she should have been calling me something else entirely.

“That’s why I feel it,” I said, and my voice cracked on the word in a way I couldn’t control. “That’s why I felt so light the first time she looked at me. I thought it was because she was your daughter. I thought maybe because she was part of you, I just… But it’s because she’s mine. She’s mine, Chloe.”

Chloe’s hands dropped from her mouth. Her face was a wreck, tears and anguish and the particular devastation of a secret that has finally found its way into the light.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Sawyer, I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?” The word hit me like a physical blow. “You didn’t just leave me without listening to me. You hid my daughter. My daughter, Chloe. For six years. She grew up without a father because you decided I didn’t get to know.”

“I didn’t know I was pregnant when I left. I found out weeks later, and by then my mom was dying and I thought you had a girlfriend and I thought…”

“You thought wrong.” My hands were flat on the table, pressed hard, the wood creaking under the pressure. “You were wrong about Rachel and you were wrong to keep this from me and you were wrong about everything, and do you have any idea, do you have any idea how hurtful it is to feel alone for the second time? I lost Jimmy. I thought I lost you. And this whole time, there was a child. Our child. And I was sitting in this cabin, alone, not knowing that we should have been a family.”

My voice broke on the last word. Family. A word I hadn’t used in ten years. A word I’d thought was a relic from a life that ended on a dirt road in Kandahar.

“Did you even like me back then?” I asked, and the vulnerability in the question, the rawness of it, the fact that I was a thirty-four-year-old man asking a woman if she’d ever cared about him, should have been humiliating. But I was past humiliation. I was past pride. I was standing in the ruins of everything I’d thought I understood and I needed to know if any of it had been real.

“I liked you,” she said, and the tears were still coming, steady and unstoppable. “I really did. Sawyer, I liked you so much that it scared me. That’s why it hurt so badly when I saw that woman. Because I had already fallen, and the fall was so far that hitting the ground nearly broke me.”

I looked at the guest room door. Behind it, my daughter was sitting on a bed with a stuffed dinosaur, waiting to be told something that would change her life.

“She needs to know,” I said. “Emma needs to know that I’m her father.”