Page 14 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

It had become a routine, the way most good things in my life became routines: gradually, then all at once. Three times a week, sometimes four, I drove out to the sawmill with Dollie after work. Dollie brought cookies or sandwiches or whatever new recipe she was testing on Josh, and I brought myself, which seemed to be the thing Sawyer wanted least and needed most.

The first week, he’d barely acknowledged me. Grunts. One-word answers. A glare so consistent you could set your watch by it. I’d say hello and he’d look at me like I was a stray cat that kept showing up on his porch, one he was determined not to feed but couldn’t quite bring himself to chase away.

The second week, the grunts became sentences. Short ones, clipped and reluctant, but sentences. “You’re here again.” “Don’t touch the equipment.” “That’s not where visitors stand.” I counted each one like a victory.

The third week, I caught him looking at me. Not the annoyed, why-are-you-still-here look. A different one. Quieter. Like he was trying to figure something out and the math wasn’t working. He’d looked away the second I noticed, and the tips of his ears had gone red, and I’d felt something warm spread through my chest that I was not ready to examine.

By the fourth week, the changes were small but unmistakable. He stopped telling me to leave. He stopped walking away when I sat near him. Once, when I’d been talking to Josh about a kid in my class who’d drawn a picture of a dinosaur eating a school, I’d heard a sound from behind me, short and bitten off, like someone had started to laugh and caught themselves. I’d turned around, but Sawyer’s face was stone, his eyes fixed on whatever he was working on. Josh had given me a look that said I told you so.

He was letting me in. Slowly. Reluctantly. Like a door opening one millimeter at a time, just enough to let a sliver of light through.

But today, I couldn’t come.

“Are you sure?” Dollie asked, leaning against my classroom door at the end of the day. She had her coat on and her keys in her hand, the sunflower cookie tin (she’d started using it as a permanent transport vessel) tucked under her arm. “It’s Wednesday. We always go on Wednesday.”

“I know, but I have twenty-three parent-teacher conference forms to fill out, and Mrs. Brennan wants them on her desk by Friday.” I gestured at the towering pile of papers on my desk, which I had been steadily ignoring all week with the kind of determined avoidance usually reserved for tax season.

Dollie looked at the pile. Then at me. Then she grinned.

“You’re going to miss your grumpy,” she said in a singsong voice.

“He’s not my grumpy.”

“You literally call him ‘my grumpy’ in texts.”

“That’s different. That’s texting. Texting doesn’t count.”

“It one hundred percent counts.”

“Go deliver your cookies, Dollie.”

She laughed, blew me a kiss, and disappeared down the hallway with the particular bounce in her step that she always had on sawmill days. I shook my head, picked up the first conference form, and got to work.

Three hours later, my hand was cramping, my eyes were blurring, and my back had formed a personal grudge against the wooden chair at my desk. But the stack was done. Every form filled out, every “areas of growth” section diplomatically worded to avoid saying “your child ate three crayons and tried to flush a shoe down the toilet.”

I gathered everything into my bag, turned off the classroom lights, and drove home.

The November afternoon had tipped into early evening, the sky turning that deep, bruised blue that happened when the sun dropped behind the mountains but hadn’t fully surrendered to night. The air was bitter now, winter creeping closer with each passing day, and the smell of woodsmoke from somewhere down the valley hung thick and warm against the cold. I cracked the window and let the sharp air rush in, clearing the fog from my brain.

I pulled onto my street, parked in my usual spot, and got out of the car.

That’s when I saw him.

Sawyer was standing on the sidewalk near my building. Not at my door, not on my porch, but close enough that there was no pretending he was just passing through. He was leaning against the trunk of the old elm tree that grew between the sidewalk and the street, arms crossed, wearing his usual uniform of flannel, work boots, and a scowl that could curdle milk. His truck was parked a few spaces down.

I stopped on the sidewalk, my bag over one shoulder, my keys in my hand.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, and then, because I couldn’t help myself: “Waiting for me?”

The scowl deepened. “No. I was just passing by. Coming from a friend’s house. Don’t assume.”

“You’re standing outside my apartment.”

“I’m standing near a tree.”

“The tree that is directly outside my apartment.”

“It’s a public tree.”