Page 102 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

His jaw moved. A small shift. The first sign that there was still someone inside the blank exterior. Then his eyes closed, tight, and when they opened again, there was something in them that I recognized. Not anger. Not grief. The thing that lived underneath both, the thing that had been following him since before.

“It is not repeating,” he said. His voice was low. Hoarse. Like the words were being dragged out of him across broken glass. “The past is not repeating itself again, right? What happened to my brother is not happening to Emma.”

“It is not the same.”

“I was not there for Jimmy. I was not fast enough. I was not smart enough. I did not see it coming.” His hands began to shake. Not the fine tremor of cold or nerves. The deep, structural shaking of a man whose foundation was cracking. “And today I was there. I was right there. I had the gun. I shot him. And he still hurt her. He still got to her. I was standing right there and my daughter got shot.”

“Sawyer…”

“I feel so useless right now.” His voice broke on the last word. Cracked straight down the middle like a beam that had taken too much weight, and the sound of it, the raw, exposed pain of a man who had been strong for everyone and had nothing left to be strong with, made my tears come harder.

He was shaking. His whole body. Hands, arms, shoulders, the tremors running through him like aftershocks, and I watched the mask he had been wearing since we arrived at the hospital finally come apart. Not all at once. In pieces. The jaw unclenching. The eyes going bright. The breath hitching in a way that had nothing to do with breathing and everything to do with the sobs he was trying to swallow.

I pulled him to me. Wrapped my arms around him and pulled his head down to my shoulder and held him the way he had held me so many times, with everything I had, pouring every ounce of strength I possessed into the grip because he needed it more than I did right now and that was what we did. We took turns being strong.

“Our daughter is strong,” I said against his hair. My voice was shaking but the words were not. The words were the steadiest thing I had. “She is stronger than both of us. Stronger than you think, stronger than I think. She survived Jonathan’s house. She survived the running. She sat in that gymnasium with a gun to her head and she did not cry, Sawyer. A six-year-old girl with a gun to her head and she held it together because she believed her papa would come. And you did.”

He made a sound against my shoulder. Not a word. Something deeper. Something that had been locked away for a very long time.

“She will fight this,” I continued. “A bullet in her foot is not going to stop Emma Matthews. Nothing stops that girl. She gets that from you. The stubbornness. The refusal to go down. She will fight this and she will win and she will be running around that cabin within weeks demanding we build her a dinosaur museum.” I pressed my lips to the top of his head. “We need to be strong for her. That is the only job right now. Being strong for Emma. The last thing she wants is us blaming ourselves. She loves her papa so much, Sawyer. She loves you. She would not want you sitting here tearing yourself apart.”

He held on. His arms around me, tight, his face pressed into my shoulder, his body gradually, slowly, stopping its shaking. Not all at once. In stages. The way a storm dies down. The worst of it passing, then the tremors easing, then the breathing steadying, then the stillness.

The doctor came out forty minutes later.

She was a woman in her fifties with calm eyes and steady hands and the demeanor of someone who had delivered both good news and bad news enough times to know how to carry both. She looked at us sitting in our plastic chairs with our red eyes and our tangled hands and she smiled. Small. But real.

“Emma is stable,” she said. “The bullet fractured two small bones in her foot. We have repaired the damage and set the bones. She is going to need a cast and several weeks of recovery, but she will make a full recovery. She is going to be fine.”

The air left my body. All of it. Every molecule of oxygen I had been holding since the moment I watched Jonathan’s gun fire at my daughter evacuated my lungs in one long, shuddering exhale, and I bent forward and pressed my hands to my face and cried. Relief. Pure, liquid, devastating relief that poured out of me in sobs I could not stop and did not try to.

Sawyer’s hand was on my back. Steady now. Steadier than before. The news had given him something to hold onto, a fact to anchor himself to, and I felt the change in him. The soldier reassembling. The father finding his footing.

“Can we see her?” he asked.

“She is waking up now. You can go in.”

We went in together. Hand in hand. The room was small and bright and full of the sounds of monitors beeping softly, and in the center of the bed, looking impossibly small against the white sheets, was our daughter.

Her foot was wrapped in a cast. Her face was pale. Her eyes were closed. Sir Chomps-a-Lot was tucked under her arm because someone, a nurse or a paramedic or an angel in scrubs, had made sure the dinosaur stayed with her through everything.

Sawyer sat in the chair beside the bed. I sat on the other side. We held her hands, one each, and we waited. The room was quiet except for the monitors and our breathing and the soft hum of the hospital going about its business around us.

“You should sleep,” Sawyer said to me. His voice was gentle. Worn. The voice of a man who had been through a war today and was trying to take care of his people even when he had nothing left.

“I am not leaving her.”

“Sleep here. In the chair. I will watch her.”

I did not want to sleep. I wanted to sit here and hold my daughter’s hand and stare at the rise and fall of her chest until my eyes stopped working. But the exhaustion was a physical thing, heavy and absolute, pressing down on me like a weight I could not lift, and Sawyer’s voice was steady and his hand was on mine and I trusted him to watch her while I rested.

I closed my eyes. Leaned my head against the side of the bed. And fell asleep with my daughter’s fingers in mine and Sawyer’s presence like a wall between us and the world.

He did not sleep. I knew this because every time I drifted up from the heavy, dreamless dark, I could hear him. His breathing, steady and deliberate, the breathing of a man who was keeping himself awake through sheer willpower. The creak of his chair when he shifted. The soft sound of his thumb moving across Emma’s hand, back and forth, a rhythm he probably did not know he was making. Once, I surfaced enough to open my eyes just a crack, and he was leaning forward with his elbows on the bed and his face in his hands and his shoulders shaking with sobs he was trying to keep silent. He did not know I was watching. I closed my eyes and let him have that grief privately, the way he needed to have it, because Sawyer Cole did not cry in front of people. He cried alone. And the fact that he was alone in a room with two people he loved more than anything and still felt he needed to hide it told me everything about the man and everything about the walls he was still learning to take down.

I woke to his hand on my shoulder. Gentle. Shaking me softly.

“Chloe,” he whispered. “She is awake.”