Page 96 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

“The rain’s fault,” Emma said firmly. “I am innocent.”

We ran to the truck. All three of us. Chloe holding Emma’s hand, me holding Chloe’s, connected like a chain, splashing through puddles that were already forming on the pavement. We piled into the truck, dripping and shivering and laughing, and Emma sat in the back seat wringing water out of Sir Chomps-a-Lot’s tail while Chloe looked at me with rain in her eyelashes and a smile on her face that was worth every storm I had ever survived.

I drove us home. The heater blasting. The windshield wipers going. Emma singing some made-up song about rain and dinosaurs. Chloe’s hand on my thigh, warm despite the cold, anchoring me to the moment.

Peace, she had said, was the presence of good things.

She was right. And the truck was full of it.

34

CHLOE

The rain caught up with us.

Not that night, and not the next morning, but by the second day the sneezing started. Emma first. A tiny, delicate sneeze that she followed with a dramatic declaration that she was dying and needed immediate medical attention in the form of ice cream and unlimited television. Then me. A headache that crept in behind my eyes and a throat that felt like I had swallowed sandpaper and a cough that rattled in my chest like something had come loose.

Sawyer was the only one standing. Of course he was. The man had taken a bullet and walked it off. A rainstorm was not going to touch him.

He was terrible at being a nurse. And by terrible, I meant perfect in the most infuriating way possible.

He woke up before both of us. I heard him in the kitchen, moving with the quiet deliberateness of a man who had spent years moving through a cabin alone and knew where every creaky floorboard was. By the time I dragged myself out of bed, wrapped in a blanket and feeling like someone had filled my skull with wet concrete, there was soup on the stove and tea on the counter and Emma was on the couch in a nest of blankets that he had constructed with the architectural precision of someone building a fort for a small queen.

“Drink this,” he said, handing me a cup.

“What is it?”

“Tea. Honey. Lemon. My mother’s recipe.”

“Your mother gave you a sick recipe?”

“My mother gave me a lot of things. Drink.”

I drank. It was good. Hot and soothing and tasting like something a grandmother would make while telling you that everything would be fine, and I hated him a little for being right about the tea the way he was right about everything practical.

Emma was worse than me. She had the kind of cold that turned a six-year-old into a limp noodle, all her usual energy drained, her nose red and running, her eyes glassy. She lay on the couch under her blanket fort with Sir Chomps-a-Lot and refused to move except to sneeze and to request increasingly specific items.

“Papa, I need juice.”

He brought juice.

“Papa, the juice needs a straw.”

He found a straw.

“Papa, Sir Chomps-a-Lot needs a blanket too. He is cold.”

He tucked a washcloth around the dinosaur with a seriousness that should have been funny but was actually the most tender thing I had ever witnessed.

He rotated between us with the efficiency of a man running a military operation, except the battlefield was a cabin and the soldiers were a sneezing woman and a six-year-old who kept requesting specific episodes of a cartoon about a detective rabbit. Soup for me. Juice for Emma. He changed the cold cloths on Emma’s forehead every twenty minutes. He reheated my tea when I let it go cold because I fell asleep sitting up on the couch. He ran a bath for Emma with the water at exactly the right temperature, not too hot, not too cold, and carried her to the tub because she was too tired to walk.

I watched him from the couch. This man who had fought in a war and taken a bullet and broken men’s bones with his bare hands, crouching beside a bathtub and making sure the water did not go in his daughter’s eyes while she splashed weakly and told him about a dream she had about a dinosaur who ran a restaurant.

“We are so lucky to have you,” I said when he came back to the living room. My voice was hoarse. Scratchy. The kind of voice that made every word feel like it was being dragged across gravel.

He sat on the edge of the couch beside me. His hand found my forehead, checking my temperature, and his palm was cool and rough against my skin.

“You both are the only thing I have now,” he said. His voice was quiet. Steady. The voice he used when he was saying something true and did not want it to be mistaken for anything less. “This is my responsibility. As a father and your future husband.”