Page 22 of Oops I Fell For The Lumberjack Next Door

Layla:

Babe. Has it occurred to you that maybe this one is different?

Me:

They always feel different in the beginning.

The rest of the evening is terrible. I edit the manuscript. Can't focus. Every third sentence I write a note about dialogue pacing, then delete it because my own dialogue was a disaster today. Princess Buttercup won't leave the window. She sits there staring at his cabin, tail flicking, meowing softly at nothing.

"I know," I tell her. "I miss him too."

She gives me a look that makes clear she holds me personally responsible.

At nine, I make tea. Stand at the counter. Through the grimy window, his cabin glows. Warm light in every room. The woodstove chimney sending smoke into the cold night air. His truck in the driveway. Tinsel on the porch, chin on paws.

He's right there. Forty feet. The same distance he's been since I arrived. Close enough to see. Too far to reach.

My phone rings again. Portland area code.

"I told you not to call."

"I know you did." Daniel's voice. Softer this time. More practiced. "But I really think if we just sat down and talked..."

"Daniel. Listen to me. Do not call this number again. Do not contact my mother for my information. Do not send emails, texts, letters, or carrier pigeons. We are divorced. It's final. It made sense, remember? Those were your words. Live with them."

A long silence.

"Okay. If that's what you want."

"It's what I want."

I hang up. Block the number. Delete the call from my log so I don't have to look at it.

Then I sit on the floor of my kitchen, back against the cabinet, legs stretched across the tile, and I cry. Hard. Ugly. The kind of crying that comes with sound effects and a runny nose and the total collapse of every wall I've built in the past year.

Not because of Daniel. Daniel is finished. Has been finished since the morning he said "that makes sense" and poured himself coffee while I stood in our kitchen holding divorce papers.

Because of Briggs. Because he said he was trying to love me, and I sent him away. Because he started to tell me something about Ryan, something that sounded important, something I wasn't ready to hear, and I shut it down. Because I'm sitting in a cabin that works now, that has running water and solid floors and a porch you can walk on, and every piece of it was built by a man who closes doors carefully and doesn't ask for credit.

And because some small, terrified part of me knows the anger wasn't really about him. It was about me. About the woman who keeps picking men who fix things, who make decisions, who take up so much space that there's nothing left for her to build on her own. Daniel did it with money. Ryan did it with charm. And Briggs does it with his hands, with lumber, with a quiet competence that makes me feel both safe and dependent in equal measure.

I wanted so badly to be the woman who could do this alone. Who didn't need the seven AM knock. Who fixed her own floor.

Instead, I'm on the kitchen tile with mascara on my wrists and a cat who thinks I've made the worst decision of my life.

Princess Buttercup climbs down from the window. Crosses the kitchen floor. Settles in my lap. Purring. Heavy. Warm.

Outside, Briggs's porch light clicks on. It stays on. Burning into the dark. Visible from my kitchen window.

He left the light on. For me.

I cry harder.

CHAPTER SIX

BRIGGS

Three days without her, and the quiet I spent eight years building feels like a sentence.