Page 88 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

I kissed her. Quick and firm, catching her lower lip between mine, tasting the coffee she had already been drinking, and then pulled back before the kiss could become something that would make me late for work.

“Papa is going to be late, Mama.” Emma’s voice came from the doorway. She was standing there in her pajamas with Sir Chomps-a-Lot under her arm and a look of patient exasperation on her face that made her look forty instead of six. “Don’t be too clingy.”

We both laughed. The kind of laugh that breaks through tension and fills a room, and Chloe pressed her forehead against mine and shook her head and I could feel her smiling against my skin.

“Your daughter just called me clingy,” Chloe said.

“She is observant.”

“She gets that from you.”

I stood up. Kissed Chloe one more time, on the forehead, quick and clean. Crouched down and kissed Emma on the top of her head. She handed me my keys, which she had taken to keeping on her nightstand because she liked being the one to give them to me each morning, a small ritual that she had invented and that I would protect with my life.

“Be safe, Papa,” she said.

“Always.”

The drive to the mill was familiar. The same road, the same trees, the same mountains standing silent and enormous on either side. But there was a difference now. The road did not feel like an escape route. It felt like a commute. A normal, everyday drive from a home with a woman and a child to a place where I built things. The normalcy of it was still new enough to feel fragile.

Josh’s truck was already in the lot when I arrived. Along with four other trucks, the crew’s, which was normal for a weekday morning. What was not normal was that Josh was standing by the main building with his hands behind his back and a look on his face that I had seen exactly twice in the years I had known him. The first time was when he proposed to Dollie. The second time was now.

“What?” I said, getting out of the truck.

“Good morning to you too.”

“You have a look on your face.”

“I have a face on my face. That is how faces work.”

“Josh.”

He grinned. Josh did not grin often. He smiled, occasionally, in the quiet way of a man who expressed his emotions in small doses. But this was a grin. Wide and open and carrying the energy of someone who was about to show you something they were proud of.

“We have a surprise,” he said.

“I do not like surprises.”

“You will like this one. Come on.”

He walked. I followed. Past the main building, past the lumber stacks, past the machinery shed, toward the road that led back through the trees to the property where my cabin stood. The cabin that had been destroyed. The cabin that I had not been back to since the night we found it wrecked because looking at it felt like looking at a loss I was not ready to face.

Josh stopped at the tree line. Gestured for me to go ahead.

I walked through the trees. The path was the same, beaten dirt, pine needles, the familiar route I had walked a thousand times. The air smelled like sawdust and resin and something else. Something fresh. Paint, maybe. New wood.

I came through the clearing and stopped.

The cabin was rebuilt.

Not repaired. Not patched. Rebuilt. The same bones, the same foundation, the same layout that I had designed and built with my own hands years ago, but new. Fresh logs, peeled and fitted, the joints clean and tight. A new front door, solid and heavy, stained dark. New windows with frames that gleamed in the morning light. The porch, rebuilt with the same wide planks, the railing straight and level. The roof, new shingles, dark and uniform.

I stood in the clearing and looked at my home and could not move.

Josh appeared beside me. He did not say anything. He stood there and let me look, the way you stand beside someone at a funeral or a birth, present but not intrusive, allowing the moment to belong to the person feeling it.

“The crew did it,” Josh said eventually, quiet. “Started the week after the break-in. Every guy on the roster put in hours after their shifts. Weekends. Evenings. Tommy drove in from Ridgecrest to do the roofing. Mike handled the electrical. Ben and his brother did the plumbing.”

I could not speak.