Page 27 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

Chloe yelped. Her papers went flying as she scrambled off the workbench, clutching the stack to her chest while the wind grabbed the loose ones and sent them scattering across the mill floor like oversized confetti.

I moved. Hit the switch for the bay doors, pulling them down against the storm, and grabbed the umbrella from the hook by the office door. By the time I got back to her, she was crouched on the floor, gathering soggy papers with an expression that was half dismay, half laughter.

“My evaluations,” she said, holding up a sheet that was already bleeding red ink. “Marcus’s mom is definitely going to have to wait.”

I opened the umbrella and held it over her, even though we were inside and the gesture was pointless. The habit was there. The instinct to put something between her and whatever was trying to get at her. Rain, cold, sadness, anything.

“You should not have come here today,” I said. “You’re going to be sick again.”

She looked up at me from the floor, her hair already damp from the mist that had blown in before I’d gotten the doors down. “Then you’ll take care of me again.”

“Not funny.”

“Who’s being funny? You made really good soup last time.”

“I don’t want you sick, Chloe.”

She stood up, the soggy papers pressed against her chest, and looked at me with an expression that shifted from playful to something softer. Something that made her blue eyes go quiet and searching. “You’re worried about me?”

“Obviously.”

The word came out before I could dress it up or sand it down. Just that. Obviously. Like it was the most self-evident thing in the world that Sawyer Cole, who had spent years perfecting the art of not caring about anything or anyone, was worried about a kindergarten teacher who couldn’t stay out of the rain.

She smiled. Not the big sunshine smile. The small one. The one that was just for me.

“Come on,” I said. “My cabin’s fifty yards from here. We can wait it out.”

“Better than swimming to the parking lot.”

I held the umbrella over both of us as we stepped outside, and it was useless within three seconds. The wind tore at it from every direction, the rain coming down sideways, and by the time we made it to the cabin porch we were both drenched. Chloe was laughing, the kind of breathless, helpless laughter that came from being soaked to the bone and finding it funny, and her hair was plastered to her face in dark, wet ribbons.

I unlocked the door and we stumbled inside.

The cabin was exactly what it had always been. Small, spare, and functional. A single open room with a bed in one corner, a kitchen along the back wall, a woodstove in the center, and my workshop taking up the entire far side. The furniture was mine, every piece built by hand during the sleepless nights that had accumulated over the years. A bookshelf. A table. Two chairs. The bed frame with its simple, clean lines, built from cedar I’d harvested myself.

There were no string lights. No throw pillows. No paper lanterns or cat socks. There was wood and stone and silence, and it had been enough for me.

“I’ll get towels,” I said. “Don’t move. You’re dripping everywhere.”

“Your cabin smells like you,” she called after me as I headed for the bathroom. “Cedar and coffee.”

I grabbed two towels from the shelf and a set of dry clothes for her (a flannel shirt that would hang past her thighs and sweatpants she’d have to cinch to keep up). When I came back into the main room, she wasn’t standing where I’d left her.

She was by the bookshelf. Her hand was raised, her fingers not quite touching a picture frame that sat on the second shelf.

She was looking at Jimmy.

My feet stopped. My lungs stopped. Everything stopped for a beat that lasted longer than it should have, because that photograph was the only personal item in the cabin. Everything else was functional, necessary, stripped of sentiment. But this I’d kept. A snapshot from before deployment, taken at a barbecue at our parents’ house. Jimmy with his arm around my shoulders, both of us sunburned and grinning, his face tipped toward mine like he was about to say something funny. He was twenty-four in that photo. Alive and bright and so full of the kind of careless joy that I’d never been able to match.

She turned to me. Her face was wet from the rain, her eyes soft and careful, and she didn’t ask the question that was clearly forming behind them. She waited.

“I’ll tell you about him later,” I said. My voice came out rougher than I intended. “Go shower. Before you catch something.”

She nodded. She didn’t push. She didn’t ask. She took the towels and the clothes and went.

I stood in the main room and listened to the rain on the roof and the distant sound of water running in the bathroom and tried not to think about the way she’d looked at that photograph. Like she already understood that whatever she was seeing was the key to the locked room inside me. Like she was willing to wait at the door for as long as it took.

When she came out, she was wearing my clothes. The flannel shirt hung past her thighs, the sleeves rolled to her wrists. The sweatpants were cinched as tight as they’d go and she still had to hold them up with one hand. She looked absurd. She looked beautiful. She looked like she belonged in my shirt, in my cabin, in the space I’d built specifically to keep the world out.