Page 60 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

“That man is wrapped around that little girl’s finger.”

“I know.”

Dollie turned to me. I knew that look. The shift from casual observation to something deeper. She grabbed my arm and pulled me away from the group, toward the edge of the lot where a row of stacked logs created a natural barrier from the noise.

“Talk to me,” she said.

I leaned against the logs and looked at the sky. Blue and cloudless, the kind of October sky that made you believe the world might actually be good.

“He called me his future wife this morning,” I said.

Dollie’s eyebrows shot up. “He what?”

“Just said it. Like it was already decided. Like he had filed the paperwork in his head and was just waiting for the rest of reality to catch up.”

“That sounds exactly like Sawyer Cole.” She crossed her arms. “And what did you say?”

“I told him it was too sweet and to get up before Emma woke up.”

“Chloe.”

“What?”

“What are you actually feeling? Not the deflection. Not the joke. The real thing.”

I looked at my hands. Picked at a splinter of sawdust caught under my nail. The real thing. The real thing was terrifying and enormous and so full of light it hurt to look at directly.

“Do you think it is worth it?” I asked. “All of it. The risk. Moving back here. Being with him again after everything that happened. After Jonathan. After the divorce. After all the running. Do you think it is actually worth it?”

Dollie was quiet for a long moment. She looked out at the sawmill, at Sawyer lifting Emma onto his shoulders so she could see the operation from above, at Josh tossing a piece of wood to one of the crew members, at the mountains rising behind everything like a promise.

“I think you have spent the last seven years surviving,” Dollie said slowly. “You survived losing Sawyer. You survived your parents dying. You survived Jonathan. You survived everything life threw at you, and you did it alone, and you did it for Emma, and you are still standing here. That is not nothing, Chloe.”

“That does not answer my question.”

“I am getting there. Be patient.” She turned to face me fully. “The question is not whether it is worth the risk. The question is whether you trust yourself to know when something is real. You trusted Jonathan and it was not real. But that does not mean your judgment is broken. It means you were grieving and alone and someone took advantage of that. That is on him. Not on you.”

My eyes burned. I blinked hard and looked away.

“Sawyer Cole is not Jonathan,” Dollie continued. “He is grumpy and stubborn and terrible at talking about his feelings, but that man has been waiting for you for seven years without even knowing if you were alive. He turned down every woman in this town. He built a cabin and lived in it alone and punished himself every single day for not being enough to make you stay. And now you are here and he is out there carrying your daughter on his shoulders like she is the best thing that ever happened to him. If that is not real, Chloe, then nothing is.”

A tear slipped down my cheek. I wiped it away with the back of my hand.

“I am scared,” I said.

“Good. You should be. Love should scare you a little. It means you have something worth losing.” She bumped my shoulder with hers. “But you are not alone this time. You have me. You have Josh. You have Emma. And you have that ridiculously attractive grumpy man over there who just called you his future wife before breakfast. Let it be worth it, Chloe. You deserve that.”

I looked back at the sawmill. Sawyer had put Emma down and was showing her something in his hands, a small carved piece of wood that he must have been working on between tasks. Emma held it up to the light and squealed, and Sawyer looked at her the way the sun looks at the horizon. Like she was the only thing worth rising for.

“Okay,” I said quietly.

“Okay what?”

“Okay, it is worth it.”

Dollie smiled. Wide and warm and the kind of smile that said she had known the answer before she asked the question but needed me to say it out loud.

“Obviously it is,” she said. “Now go tell your future husband to stop being so adorable. It is making the rest of us look bad.”