Page 90 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

“It is the sawdust.”

“We are not at the mill. There is no sawdust in here.”

“There is sawdust everywhere. I am a lumberjack.”

“You are crying.” He was grinning so wide now that it looked like his face might split open. “After all these years. After everything. It took a purple bedroom and a dinosaur shelf to break you.”

“I am going to fire you.”

“You are not going to fire me. You are going to hug me.”

“I am absolutely not going to hug you.”

“You want to. I can see it. Your arms are twitching.”

“My arms are not twitching.”

“Sawyer Cole is standing in his rebuilt cabin with tears in his eyes and he will not even hug his best friend. I am telling Dollie about this.”

“Do not tell Dollie.”

“I am telling Dollie, Chloe, Emma, and every man at the mill. Sawyer Cole cried in his new cabin. They will love it.”

I looked at him. This man who had been my best friend for over a decade. Who had driven me to the hospital. Who had organized a crew to rebuild my home without telling me. Who had stood beside me through the worst of it and was standing beside me now through the best of it, teasing me about tears because that was what brothers did.

“Thank you,” I said again. Steadier this time. “I mean it, Josh.”

His grin softened into something warmer. Something real. He pushed off the doorframe and clapped me on the back the way men do when they mean I love you but would rather die than say it.

“You are a good man, Josh,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “Now get back to work before I take a picture of your face and make it the mill’s Christmas card.”

I walked back to the mill with my hands in my pockets and the key to the new front door in my palm and something in my chest that was warm and steady and felt, for the first time in a very long time, like it was going to stay.

32

CHLOE

The cabin smelled like new wood and home.

I stood in the doorway and ran my fingers along the fresh logs, smooth and tight and built with the kind of care that could not be faked. Behind me, Sawyer carried in the last of our bags from the truck while Emma sprinted from room to room, her voice bouncing off the walls as she discovered each space like a tiny explorer mapping new territory.

“Mama, my room is purple!”

“I can hear that, baby.”

“There is a shelf for my dinosaurs! Papa, there is a shelf!”

I watched her disappear into the kitchen and then back out again, Sir Chomps-a-Lot held high like a torch, and the sound of her happiness filling this rebuilt space made my chest so tight I had to breathe carefully to keep the tears from starting again.

Sawyer set the bags down in the hallway. He looked at me. I looked at him. And the thing that passed between us in that moment did not need words. We were home.

That evening, we sat at the kitchen table and talked about what came next. The practical things. The safety things. The kind of conversation that other families did not need to have but that we had learned to treat as routine.

“We all go to the sawmill every day,” Sawyer said. His voice was steady. Certain. The voice of a man laying out a plan he had already decided on and was presenting as a discussion out of courtesy. “You and Emma come with me. You stay at the mill while I work. The crew is there. I am there. Nobody gets to either of you without going through all of us.”

“Sawyer, we cannot live at your sawmill.”