Page 66 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

Sawyer led me down the hallway to his old room. He opened the door and I stepped inside and felt something shift in my chest.

It was a boy’s room that had been preserved by a mother who could not let go. A twin bed with a plaid comforter. A wooden desk with initials carved into the corner. Shelves lined with books and small wooden carvings, the early work of a boy who would grow up to build things for a living. There were photographs on the wall. Sawyer as a teenager, serious even then, standing beside Jimmy who was grinning wide enough for both of them. A baseball trophy. A folded flag from his enlistment ceremony.

“This was your room,” I said.

“Has not changed.”

“Your mother kept everything.”

“She does that.”

I looked at him standing in the doorway of his childhood bedroom, this enormous man filling a space that had been built for a boy, and the contrast between who he had been and who he was now hit me in a way I was not prepared for. He had grown up in this house. He had been loved in this house. And then the world had taken his brother and his softness and left him with scars and silence, and he had built a cabin in the woods and hidden there for a decade.

But he was not hiding anymore. He was standing in his old room with the woman he had called his future wife and their daughter sleeping down the hall and his parents under the same roof, and the walls he had built were coming down faster than he could rebuild them.

I walked to him. Wrapped my arms around his waist. Pressed my face into his chest and breathed in the smell of him, wood and soap and the faint trace of his mother’s apple pie that clung to his flannel.

“I am happy that life brought me back to you,” I said. “It is worth all the risk. Every bit of it. Every hard thing that happened. Every wrong turn. It is all worth it because it led me here.”

He tightened his arms around me. I felt him press his lips to the top of my head, felt his chest expand with a breath that he held for a long time before letting go.

“Stay,” he said. Just that. One word. The only one he needed.

“I am not going anywhere,” I said.

We stood in his childhood room with the photographs on the wall and the wooden carvings on the shelf and our daughter sleeping safely down the hall, and he held me until the last of the daylight faded through the window and the house settled into the kind of quiet that only comes from a home where people are finally, after a very long time, exactly where they belong.

24

SAWYER

We came home to wreckage.

I saw it before I even cut the engine. The front door of the cabin was open. Not ajar. Open. Hanging at an angle that told me someone had put a boot through it near the lock, the wood splintered and pale where it had cracked, and the sight of it sent a cold current through my blood that I recognized from a life I had lived before this one. A life where open doors and broken things meant danger.

“Stay in the truck,” I said.

Chloe’s hand was already on the door handle. She looked at me, then at the cabin, and I watched the color drain from her face. Her eyes went to the rearview mirror, to Emma in the backseat, still sleepy from the drive.

“Sawyer…”

“Stay in the truck. Lock the doors.”

I got out. The evening air was cold and the forest was too quiet, the kind of quiet that came from everything holding its breath. I walked to the front door with my boots crunching on the porch steps and pushed it open the rest of the way and stood in the doorway and looked at what was left of my home.

The living room was destroyed. Furniture overturned. The couch slashed open, stuffing spilling out like the insides of something gutted. The bookshelf had been pulled down, the books scattered across the floor, pages torn and spines broken. The kitchen was worse. Every cabinet open. Dishes shattered on the floor, glass and ceramic in pieces that crunched under my boots as I stepped inside. The table I had built, the one where we had eaten breakfast that morning with candles and flowers, was on its side with one leg cracked.

I moved through the cabin room by room. Emma’s room. The bed stripped, the mattress cut open, clothes thrown from the drawers. Sir Chomps-a-Lot’s backup home, the small box where Emma kept extra blankets for the dinosaur, overturned and emptied. My room. Same destruction. Drawers pulled out. The closet ransacked. The mattress slashed in a long diagonal cut that told me whoever did this had taken their time. Had enjoyed it.

I went back to the living room. And that was when I saw it.

The message was carved into the wall above the fireplace. Deep cuts in the wood, made with a knife, each letter deliberate and controlled. Not the work of rage. The work of someone who wanted to be clear.

SHE BELONGS TO ME.

I stood in front of it and read it twice and felt something move through me that was not fear. Fear was a reaction I had trained myself out of in a desert ten thousand miles from here. This was something older. Darker. The primal, absolute fury of a man whose family had been threatened in his own home.

Jonathan.