Page 55 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

“Yeah, bug,” he said. “We can have hot chocolate.”

Emma burst out of her room like she’d been spring-loaded, and the cabin filled with her noise and her energy. I watched Sawyer make hot chocolate for his daughter, stirring the pot with careful precision while Emma stood on a chair beside him, supervising the marshmallow ratio.

I sat at the table and watched them, and I thought: we’re going to be okay.

Not perfect. Not fixed. Not the fairy tale I’d imagined at twenty-four.

But okay. And okay, after everything, felt like a miracle.

20

SAWYER

Icooked for them.

It was not something I planned. I woke up that morning and watched Chloe move through the kitchen the way she had every morning since she and Emma arrived, opening cabinets like she knew where everything was, humming something low under her breath while the coffee brewed, and something in me decided that it was my turn. She had been feeding us. Every meal. Every day. Like it was her job, like it came naturally, and maybe it did, but she was not the only one who lived in this cabin.

So I told her to stay out of the kitchen.

She raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

“I said stay out. I am cooking tonight.”

“You can barely make toast without burning it.”

“Sit down, Chloe.”

She sat. But she watched me from the table with the kind of amused skepticism that made me want to prove her wrong about everything she had ever doubted about me.

I made roasted chicken. Potatoes with garlic and butter. Green beans. Simple things, nothing that required any kind of genius, but I followed every step carefully. Measured the salt. Checked the temperature. Treated it the way I treated lumber, with precision and patience, because if you do the thing right, it holds.

Emma sat next to her mother, drawing dinosaurs on a napkin while stealing glances at the stove. The smell had filled the cabin, warm and rich, and I could see her nose twitching every time I opened the oven.

I plated the food. Three plates. Set them on the table. Took my seat across from them and waited.

Emma picked up her fork. She cut a piece of chicken, chewed it slowly with the serious expression of someone making a very important decision, and then her whole face opened up.

“This is delicious, Papa!”

I smiled.

Not the half thing I sometimes gave when Emma caught me off guard. Not the shadow of one that I used to deflect. A real smile. Wide and open and using muscles I had not used in so long they felt stiff. It broke across my face before I could stop it, before I could even think about stopping it, and it stayed there, warm and unfamiliar and terrifying in how easy it felt.

Chloe put her fork down. She stared at me. Her blue eyes went soft in a way that made my chest tight, and she tilted her head like she was seeing something she had been waiting a long time to see.

“She really got your soft spot,” Chloe said quietly. “Smiling looks good on you.”

“You have the same effect, Chloe,” I said, looking straight at her. “But with a mix of irritation. You are always testing my patience.”

She laughed. Not the polite one she gave strangers or the careful one she used when she was trying not to make too much noise. The real one. Full and bright and loud enough to fill the room, the kind of laugh that made her throw her head back and press her hand to her chest, and the sound of it hit me the way it always did. Like a fist to the sternum. Like something I had been missing without knowing I was missing it.

“You know, Emma,” I said, turning to my daughter. “Your mama pursued me.”

Emma’s eyes went wide. She turned to Chloe with her mouth open, the kind of shocked delight that only a child can produce when they learn something scandalous about their parent.

“Really, Mama?”

Chloe’s face turned red. Not pink. Red. The kind of red that started at her neck and climbed all the way to her ears, and she pressed her lips together and looked at me with a warning in her eyes that I ignored completely.