Page 19 of Oops I Fell For The Lumberjack Next Door

My stomach drops. Straight down, past my knees, into the porch boards.

"How did you get this number."

"Your mother."

Of course. My mother, who still has Daniel's contact in her phone because she adored him, who calls him on his birthday, who cried harder about the divorce than I did.

"What do you want, Daniel."

"I wanted to check on you. Your mom said you moved to some mountain town in Nevada. Bought a cabin?"

"I bought a cabin."

"Alone?"

"That's generally how it works when you're divorced."

A pause. He clears his throat. Daniel always clears his throat before he says something he's rehearsed. Seven years of marriage, I know every single tell.

"I've been thinking a lot about us, Margot. About what happened. I know I wasn't present. I know I checked out. But I've been seeing someone. A therapist. And I've been doing a lot of work on myself, and I think we owe it to the years we invested to have a real conversation about whether we could try again."

"No."

"Margot." He waits. "Please."

"No. Daniel. We are not having this conversation. You did not invest in our marriage. You occupied it. You were a tenant in a relationship, and when I finally asked you to leave, you didn't even put up a fight. Remember? I said I wanted a divorce, and you said, 'Okay, that makes sense.' You said it made sense, Daniel."

Silence on the line. Then another throat clear. "That's fair. I deserve that. But people change, and I've been..."

"Great. Change somewhere else. Don't call this number again."

I hang up. Set the phone face down on the porch railing. My hands are shaking. The manuscript on my screen blurs. Princess Buttercup lifts her head from my lap, ears forward, sensing the shift.

Daniel calling shouldn't rattle me this much. He's not a threat. He's not dangerous. He's just a man who wasted my thirties and now wants to renegotiate. But the timing is poison, because hearing his voice while I'm sitting on Briggs's porch, wearing Briggs's flannel, sleeping in Briggs's bed, drops a cold clarity into my chest that I've been avoiding for days.

I'm doing it again.

Same pattern. Different man. A decade ago, I built my world around Ryan Prescott, let him become the center of everything, and when it collapsed, I was standing in wreckage I didn't know how to navigate alone. Then I married Daniel. Handed him the blueprint of my life and let him fill in the architecture. When that collapsed, I drove three hundred miles to start over.

Fresh start. Independence. Building something with my own hands.

And within two weeks, I've handed my toolbox to a man I used to hate and let him rebuild my house, my schedule, and apparently my ability to be alone.

The porch. The pipes. The floor. The cat. Every single problem I've had since arriving in Whisper Vale, Briggs Holloway has fixed. And I've let him. Worse, I've started expecting it. The seven AM knock. The lumber in his truck. The quiet competence that makes me feel safe while simultaneously proving that I can't manage a single week without a man propping me up.

My therapist in Portland would have something measured to say about this. Something about recognizing patterns versus pathologizing connection. About the difference between depending on someone and relying on them.

But my therapist isn't here. And my ex husband just called, and Briggs's flannel smells like him, and I'm sitting on a porch he built with wood from his farm, and panic is rising in my throat.

I close the laptop. Go inside. Change into my own clothes. Fold the flannel, leave it on the kitchen counter.

An hour later, Briggs appears at the side door. He's filthy from the farm. Pine needles in his hair, resin on his hands. He comes in the way he always does now, without knocking, like the door is his too. Grabs a glass, fills it from the tap Ray fixed last week, drinks it standing at the counter.

His eyes find the flannel. Folded. Returned.

"You okay?"

"Fine."