Page 54 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

He was still. Listening with his whole body.

“My dad called while you were still asleep. I was standing on your porch, wearing your shirt, still feeling you everywhere on my skin. And he told me my mother had stage four pancreatic cancer. Terminal.” My voice was steady. I’d practiced this in my head a hundred times over the past week. “And then Rachel walked up. And everything hit at once. My mother was dying and you belonged to someone else and I didn’t have a single thing left inside me to question any of it. So I ran.”

I looked at my hands in my lap. They were shaking.

“I found out I was pregnant six weeks later. My mom was in chemo, throwing up every day and losing her hair, and she would still hold my hand and tell me everything was going to be fine. And I sat next to her hospital bed and looked at that pregnancy test and all I could think was that I was alone. That you had someone. That the baby was all I had left of the time when things had been good.”

The tears came. I let them.

“She died on a Tuesday in April. Holding my hand. Telling me to stop crying and go live my life. And my dad died the year after. Heart attack. Alone. By the time I got the call, he was already gone. And I was twenty-six with a baby and no parents and no one. Just empty rooms and a grief so heavy I couldn’t get out of bed some mornings.”

I wiped my face. Took a breath.

“That’s how Jonathan got me, Sawyer. That’s the part I need you to understand. He didn’t trick some strong, put-together woman. He found a broken one. I was drowning, and he showed up with a life raft, and I grabbed it because I was too tired to keep swimming alone. He was kind. He was present. He held Emma and called her princess and cooked dinner and sat with me on the nights when the grief was so bad I couldn’t breathe. And I mistook all of that for love because I’d forgotten what real love felt like. Because the only real love I’d ever known was in a cabin in Pinewood Ridge, and I’d convinced myself that wasn’t real either.”

My voice cracked but I kept going.

“And once I was inside that marriage, once the door closed and the mask came off, I was too afraid to leave. Not just because of what he’d do. Because I was ashamed. Ashamed that I’d chosen wrong again. Ashamed that I’d let my grief walk me straight into a cage. I kept thinking, you left Sawyer for this. You left the only man who ever made you feel safe for a man who makes you feel small. And the shame just piled on top of the fear until I couldn’t move.”

I wiped my eyes and it didn’t help because the tears kept falling.

“And even after I got out, even after the divorce, the fear didn’t stop. It just changed shape. I was scared of coming back here. Scared that you’d moved on. Scared of telling you about Emma. Because what if you hated me? What if you looked at me and saw the woman who stole six years of your daughter’s life? What if the truth destroyed whatever was left between us?”

I was crying hard now, my shoulders shaking.

“Every time I picked up the phone to call you, the fear won. Every time I thought about driving back here, the fear won. It always won, Sawyer. Year after year after year. Until I had nowhere left to run and this town was the only place that felt safe enough to stop. And the thing I was most terrified of, the thing that kept me frozen more than Jonathan, more than the running, more than any of it, was losing you for good.”

Sawyer reached for me.

His arms came around me and pulled me against his chest, and the contact, the solid, encompassing warmth of him, broke the last wall I’d been hiding behind. I pressed my face into his neck and cried.

He held me. His hand in my hair. His chin on the top of my head. His arms like a fortress.

“I didn’t know,” he said, and his voice was rough, broken at the edges. “I didn’t know that this is how painful it was on your side. I just knew that you kept haunting me. For all those years you were gone, you never left my mind. Not for a single day. Not once.” His arms tightened. “The time you walked away is the time I was ready to open myself to you. To everything. And then you were gone.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered against his chest. “I’m so sorry.”

He pulled back enough to look at my face. His hands framed my jaw, his thumbs brushing the tears from my cheeks.

“The timing fucked us up,” he said. “Both of us. We were two broken people who found each other at exactly the right moment and then the world tore us apart at the worst one.” His thumbs moved across my cheekbones, gentle. “But here’s what we do now. We focus on Emma. I will protect both of you. Whatever it takes. Whatever comes. That man does not get near you or my daughter again.”

The certainty in his voice settled something inside me that had been unsettled for seven years.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay,” he said.

We sat on the couch, my head on his shoulder, his arm around me, and the silence between us was not cold. It was the silence of two people who had finally told each other everything and were sitting in the clearing where the truth had burned it all away, looking at what was left and finding that it was enough to build on.

Emma’s door opened a crack. One green eye appeared.

“Are you done being sad?” she asked.

“We’re done,” Sawyer said.

“Good. Can we have hot chocolate?”

He looked at me. I looked at him. And for the first time in weeks, the corner of his mouth twitched in the direction of a smile.