Page 52 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

Chloe nodded. Wiped her face. Took a breath that shuddered on the way in and steadied on the way out. “Okay.”

We went to the guest room together.

Emma was sitting on the bed, cross-legged, Sir Chomps-a-Lot in her lap. She looked up when we came in, and her green eyes moved between us with the careful assessment of a child who had learned to read the emotional weather in a room before anything else.

“Are you both okay?” she asked. “Your eyes are red.”

Chloe sat on the bed beside her. I stood in the doorway because my legs weren’t entirely trustworthy and I needed the frame to lean on.

“Baby,” Chloe said, and her voice was gentle, so gentle. “There’s something we need to tell you. Something important and good. Something that should have been told a long time ago.”

Emma looked at me. Then at Chloe. Then back at me.

“Sawyer,” Chloe said, “is your father. Your real father. Your papa.”

Emma was quiet for a long moment. Long enough for my heart to beat five times, each one louder than the last. Then her face did something extraordinary. It crumpled and opened at the same time, the way a flower looks when it blooms in fast-forward, and her eyes filled with tears that matched the ones still drying on my cheeks.

“I knew it,” she whispered. “I knew it, Mama. I always felt it.”

She launched herself off the bed.

I caught her. My arms closed around her, lifting her off the ground, and she wrapped herself around me with the fierce, total commitment of a child who has been waiting for something her whole life and has finally, finally found it. Her face was in my neck and her arms were around my shoulders and she was crying, the clean, honest tears of a six-year-old who doesn’t know how to grieve and rejoice at the same time but is doing both.

I held my daughter.

For the first time. After six years. In a cabin I’d built for solitude. I held her, and the thing that had been missing, the thing that no amount of work or silence or black coffee could fill, clicked into place with a sound like a lock opening, and I understood, finally, completely, what Jimmy had felt that day in the truck when he’d talked about his unborn child with the kind of joy that makes a man invincible.

“Papa,” Emma said into my neck. The first time. The real first time.

“I’m here,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Over her shoulder, I saw Chloe. Standing by the bed, her hand over her mouth, tears running down her face, watching us with an expression that held everything. Love. Grief. Relief. Regret. The unbearable weight of years wasted and the fragile, desperate hope that maybe, maybe, it wasn’t too late.

I held Emma tighter.

And began, very slowly, to forgive.

19

CHLOE

He was good to Emma. Perfect, actually.

In the days after the truth came out, Sawyer had transformed into something I’d never seen before. He built her the triceratops, three days of careful carving in his workshop, and presented it to her at breakfast like it was an offering. He read to her every night, graduating from woodworking manuals to actual children’s books that appeared in the cabin one afternoon, purchased during a trip to town he’d made without telling me. He listened when she talked about dinosaurs, which was constantly, and asked follow-up questions that proved he was actually retaining the information, which delighted her to the point of incoherence.

He was patient and present and gentle in a way that broke my heart, because I could see him learning how to be a father in real time, teaching himself through instinct and attention and the sheer force of wanting to get it right.

But with me, he was cold.

Not cruel. Sawyer didn’t do cruel, not to me, not even when he had every right to. But the warmth that had been building between us, the careful, tentative thawing that had started at the hospital and continued through the first week at the cabin, had frozen over. He spoke to me in short sentences. He didn’t look at me when we were in the same room unless Emma was present. He answered my questions with the minimum number of words required and volunteered nothing.

He was a man in the process of forgiving me, and the process was slow, and the waiting was agonizing.

So I gave him space. I cooked his meals and helped with his foot and kept the cabin running and didn’t push. I let him have his coldness because he had earned it, and I swallowed the ache that came with being in the same room as the man I loved and feeling him hold himself at a distance that was precise and deliberate and impossible to bridge.

He was at the sawmill today. His foot had healed enough that the doctor had cleared him for work, and he’d returned to the mill with the single-minded focus of a man who needed to put his hands on something solid. Emma and I stayed at the cabin. She played in the yard with Sir Chomps-a-Lot while I sat on the porch and tried to read a book and succeeded in reading the same paragraph seven times without absorbing a word.

When Emma came inside, she was quiet. She sat down next to me on the porch steps, Sir Chomps-a-Lot in her lap, and looked out at the trees with an expression that was too old for six.