Page 67 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

I turned and walked back outside. Chloe was in the truck with the doors locked and Emma pressed against her side, and the look on Chloe’s face when she saw my expression told me she already knew. She had known the moment she saw the broken door. Maybe she had been waiting for this. Maybe some part of her had always been waiting for this.

I opened the truck door. “It is wrecked inside. Someone broke in and tore the place apart. There is a message.”

“What kind of message?” Her voice was thin. Stretched tight like a wire about to snap.

“The kind that tells me your ex-husband knows where you are.”

She closed her eyes. Her hand tightened on Emma’s shoulder and I watched her jaw clench and her breathing go shallow and I recognized the look because I had seen it at the hospital, the night she first told me about Jonathan. Terror buried under control. A woman who had spent years learning how to be afraid without letting it show.

“Mama?” Emma’s voice was small. “What happened to our house?”

“Nothing, baby.” Chloe’s voice was steady. Impressively steady. “There was a problem inside. We are going to stay somewhere else tonight.”

“Is it the bad man?”

The question hit the air like a stone dropped into still water. Chloe flinched. I watched it move through her, the realization that her daughter knew, that Emma had absorbed enough of the fear and the running and the looking over her shoulder to understand that there was a bad man and he was the reason they could not stay in one place.

“Nobody is going to hurt you,” I said. I crouched beside the truck so I was at Emma’s eye level. “Nobody is going to hurt you or your mama. Do you hear me, Emma?”

She looked at me with those green eyes that were mine. Serious. Searching. Looking for the truth the way children do, not in the words but in the face of the person saying them.

“Promise, Papa?”

“I promise.”

She nodded. Slowly. Then she reached out and put her small hand on my cheek, and the touch of her fingers on my skin was the thing that sealed it. I would burn the world down before I let anyone touch her. I would burn the world down before I let anyone touch either of them.

I called Josh.

He answered on the second ring. I told him what happened. Kept it short. Direct. The way you report a situation when the situation is ongoing and emotions are a luxury you cannot afford.

“I am calling the police,” Josh said. “Stay put. Do not go back inside. Do not touch anything.”

“I already went inside.”

“Of course you did. Stay put now.”

The police came. Two officers in a county cruiser, the only ones on duty for this stretch of Pinewood Ridge. They took photographs. Documented the damage. Bagged the knife that had been left on the kitchen floor, the one used to carve the message. They asked Chloe questions, and she answered them with the controlled precision of a woman who had told this story before, who knew the details by heart because she had lived them. Jonathan Marshall. Her ex-husband. Son of the mayor of her former town. Possessive. Controlling. Violent.

The officers took notes. Made promises about filing reports and contacting the jurisdiction where the restraining order had been issued. I stood behind Chloe with my arms crossed and listened to them talk about process and paperwork and coordination between departments, and the distance between their words and the reality of what had happened to my home made my jaw ache from clenching.

Josh arrived while the officers were finishing. He pulled me aside while Dollie, who had come with him, sat with Chloe and Emma in the truck.

“This is targeted,” Josh said. Quiet. Steady. The voice of a man who had dealt with bad situations before and knew how to keep his head. “This was not a random break-in. He knew where to find her.”

“I know.”

“You cannot stay here.”

“I know that too.”

“My parents’ house.” Josh paused. Looked at me. “The old place on Cedar Road. It has been empty since they passed, but I have kept it maintained. Three bedrooms. Good locks. Set back from the road. No one outside of town would know it exists.”

I looked at the cabin. My cabin. The place I had built with my own hands, log by log, nail by nail, in the years after the war when I needed something to do with my rage and my grief. It had been my refuge. My hiding place. The fortress I had constructed to keep the world out. And now someone had broken through the walls and left a message on the stone.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You do not need to thank me. You need to keep that woman and that little girl safe.”