Page 107 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

But the overtime had caught up with me. The papers had stacked. The grading had fallen behind. And tonight I had stayed late to catch up, sitting at my desk in the empty school with the fluorescent lights buzzing above me and the silence of a building that was built for noise wrapping around me like a blanket.

I woke up to lips on my cheek.

Soft. Warm. The scratch of stubble against my skin and the smell of cedar and pine and the faint trace of sawdust that always clung to him no matter how many showers he took.

“Love,” I murmured, lifting my head. The papers stuck to my cheek. I peeled them off and blinked at the light. “What time is it?”

“It is night already,” Sawyer said.

He was crouching beside my desk, his face level with mine, those green eyes looking at me with a mixture of amusement and concern that was uniquely his. He was still in his work clothes, flannel sleeves rolled up, sawdust on his boots, and the sight of him in my classroom, this big, rough-hewn man surrounded by tiny desks and alphabet posters and a bulletin board covered in crayon drawings, was so incongruous it almost made me laugh.

“I fell asleep,” I said, pushing myself upright. My neck ached. My back was stiff. There was a crease in my cheek from the papers. “I am not done checking papers yet.”

I looked at the stack. Still substantial. Still sitting there with the patient accusation of work that was not going to do itself.

“I will help you,” he said.

“You cannot grade kindergarten papers.”

“I can read. I can circle things. Show me what to do.”

He pulled a tiny chair from one of the student desks and sat down beside me, his knees up near his chest because the chair was designed for a five-year-old and he was a six-foot-three lumberjack, and the sight of him folded into that miniature seat with a red marker in his hand and a stack of spelling tests in front of him was something I wished I had a camera for.

I showed him the rubric. Simple. Check marks for correct answers. Circles for mistakes. A sticker at the top for effort, because every child got a sticker regardless of their score because effort mattered more than accuracy at this age and I would fight anyone who disagreed.

He graded with the same precision he brought to lumber. Careful. Methodical. Reading each paper thoroughly, marking each answer with a deliberateness that suggested he was taking the task very seriously, which he was, because Sawyer Cole did not know how to do anything halfway.

“This child spelled ‘cat’ with a K,” he said.

“Marcus is creative.”

“This child drew a dinosaur on the back of the test.”

“That is Lily. She draws dinosaurs on everything. She and Emma are kindred spirits.”

“This child wrote their name backwards.”

“That is developmental. It is normal.”

He looked at me. “Children are strange.”

“Children are wonderful.”

“They can be both.”

We graded together. Side by side at my desk, in a kindergarten classroom at night, with the fluorescent lights humming and the empty school settling around us. His shoulder pressed against mine. His hand reached across me for stickers, which he applied with surgical precision to the top of each paper. And the domesticity of it, the ordinary, unremarkable intimacy of two people doing a task together in a quiet room, made my heart ache in the way that only good things can make it ache.

We finished the stack. I gathered the papers, filed them in the folder, grabbed my bag. Sawyer stood up from the tiny chair with a groan that suggested his knees would be filing a formal complaint.

“Where is Emma?” I asked as we walked to the truck.

“With Dollie.”

“On a school night?”

“Dollie volunteered.”

“Dollie always volunteers.”