Page 46 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

“I eat them occasionally.”

“Mama can make you some. She makes really good ones. With chocolate chips and everything.”

“Emma, please stop helping,” Chloe whispered.

“I’m just being friendly, Mama. You said I should always be friendly.”

The cabin appeared through the trees, and the car went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with Emma’s commentary. I watched Chloe’s face in the side mirror. The color drained from her cheeks, replacing the pink with something paler, and her eyes went distant, traveling back to a night seven years ago when she’d sat at my kitchen table in my flannel shirt and listened to me talk about my brother.

We pulled up. Dollie parked and was out of the car before anyone else, unloading bags from the trunk with the focused energy of a woman on a mission. Emma unbuckled herself with practiced efficiency and hopped out, Sir Chomps-a-Lot in tow, and stood in the yard looking at the cabin with wide eyes.

“This is your house?” she asked me.

“This is my house.”

“It looks like a house in a storybook. Does it have a fireplace?”

“It does.”

“Does it have a yard?”

“The whole forest is the yard.”

Her face lit up like I’d told her Christmas had been moved to tomorrow. She turned to Chloe, who was getting out of the car slowly, her eyes still on the cabin. “Mama, did you hear that? The whole forest is the yard.”

I got the crutches from the backseat and made my way to the porch. Chloe was standing at the bottom of the steps, looking up at the door, and I could see the memories moving behind her eyes. The rain. The kitchen. The picture of Jimmy. Everything that had happened in this cabin, the best night and the worst morning, all of it contained in these four walls.

I stopped beside her. Close enough that my arm brushed hers.

“Are you remembering something?” I asked, low enough that only she could hear.

She turned to look at me, and whatever was in her expression, the mix of grief and memory and something softer that she was trying to hold back, flashed hot. She planted both hands on my chest and shoved.

The crutches went out from under me and I went down, landing on my back on the grass with a thud that knocked the air out of my lungs and sent a bolt of pain through my injured foot.

“Mama, be careful!” Emma shrieked, running over. “He’s hurt!”

Chloe stood over me, her cheeks flushed, her jaw set, looking exactly like the woman who had once called me a bitter grumpy man in my own sawmill. Then the anger cracked, and underneath it was something that looked suspiciously like the urge to laugh, and she bent down and grabbed my arm.

“Get up,” she said, pulling me to sitting with a strength that belied her size. She retrieved the crutches and shoved them at me. “Don’t whisper things in my ear.”

“I asked a question.”

“It was a loaded question and you know it.”

I looked up at her from the ground, grass in my hair, my foot throbbing, and something happened that hadn’t happened in seven years.

I laughed.

Not a small, bitten-off sound. Not the ghost of amusement I’d allowed myself in rare moments. A real laugh, full and rough and startled out of me by the sheer absurdity of being knocked down by a woman half my size who was angry at me for asking if she had memories. It burst out of me like something that had been locked in a room and finally kicked the door open.

Chloe stared at me. Her mouth opened. Her eyes went wide.

“Did you just… laugh?” she said.

Emma clapped. “He did! He laughed! Mama, you made him laugh!”

Dollie, who had paused in the doorway with a suitcase in each hand, looked at the scene on the lawn with the expression of a woman who was mentally composing a text to Josh that would be forty-seven paragraphs long.