Page 12 of Wolf It Down, Knot Me Up

“You always did like an audience,” I say, earning a smile from him.

“Well, Eve’s got a big summer launch coming, and she hired an actual agency for the advertising. Honestly, we’re close to being booked out for the upcoming season already. That’ll claw back a real chunk of what she spent.” He wipes down a counter that’s already clean. “And the logging side’s carrying us through the quiet months meanwhile. She still runs the reintegration program. Three men up here right now, working the woods as lumberjacks.”

Cold slides down through my stomach because I grew up with that program in effect, and it’s not a neutral word to me. But I just smile, not wanting to open that door.

“These red pines in our woods sell for stupid money,” he explains with his hands dancing around. “And Eve needs a camping area flattened for summer anyway, so the trees she has to clear, she sells. Fair warning, you’ll spot the guys around. They handle maintenance too since we’re short on labor. Gutters, firewood, anything that needs muscle.”

“And they’re staying in one of the cabins, right?”

“Yep. They keep to themselves mostly. I go over and cook for the four of us most nights, since it’s dead quiet here otherwise and cooking for one is no fun, but other times, Eve was taking care of them. Yet you’re home now, so once I get their meals done, tonight it’s just us two, and I’m cooking us up a storm.”

The cold in my stomach loosens its grip a little. “I’ve missed your cooking. Miami has restaurants, but nothing compares to yours.”

“That’s music to my ears.” He grins and jerks his head toward the staircase. “Come on, I’ll take you up.”

The staircase turns at a landing under a window full of pines, and Ethan narrates as we climb, hands going. “Guest rooms along the gallery, eight of them, all en suite now. Eve named them after trees. Pine, Alder, Rowan. I voted for famous chefs and was defeated.” He stops in front of tall double doors, darker timber than the rest, iron handles. “And this is you. Private family wing, fully separate from the guest side. Key’s on the inside, so lock it whenever you like. I’d make it a habit once summer starts. Guests wander like cats.”

“And you’re where?”

“Quarters behind the kitchen, downstairs. Close to the ovens and the front door, so if anyone shows up unannounced, I’m the one who hears it.” He leans a shoulder against the doorframe. “Which happens, by the way. Last month, two separate families just arrived. No booking. Kids, coolers, one extremely confident golden retriever. We had the space, luckily, but I’ve learned to sleep with one ear aimed at the driveway.”

“You’ve been holding this whole place together with Eve!” It comes out more serious than I plan, because it’s suddenly very clear, the size of it. “And alone since she fell.”

The grin fades only so slightly. “She’d do it for me,” he says simply. “But that’s why you’re here now to help out.” Then he straightens off the frame and knocks twice on the double doors, brisk again. “Go on in. Several bedrooms, take your pick, but Eve’s room is in the left wing, so I’d go right. Total privacy, and the far room has a view of the waterfall through the trees.” He’s already backing away along the gallery. “Rest that bandaged hand. I’ll come bang the pans around in a few hours and feed you something unforgettable.”

I chuckle and hug him. “Thanks, Ethan.”

“Welcome home.” And he leaves, heading downstairs.

So I step inside and shut the door behind me, where I find a small stone fireplace with the kindling already laid. Shelves of the old paperbacks with their cracked spines, the exact ones, I’d swear to it. Down the hall, a kitchen that’s lovely without showing off, timber cabinets, a farmhouse sink under a window full of green, a kettle on the stove, and mugs hanging on hooks.

The hallway splits into wings, and I go right, past one door, then another, to the room at the end, and push it open.

Oh.

Log walls the color of dark honey. Beams low and close overhead, with a wide bed and a carved headboard. It’s covered in charcoal linen, fur throws tumbled across the foot, soft enough that my fingers itch from the doorway. Lanterns hang from the beams, iron and glass, and there’s a stone fireplace right in the bedroom. The windows pull the forest’s green light inside.

“This is perfect.” I drop my backpack at the foot of the bed and spot the glass door in the corner. The balcony.

Outside, the air is cool silk. The forest stands close enough that I could lean over the railing and touch the nearest boughs. Between two of them, far off through a notch in the ridge, a thin white thread of falling water catches the sun. The waterfall, and Ethan wasn’t exaggerating.

I sink into the balcony chair and breathe it all the way to the bottom of my lungs, and for the first time in five years, I can inhale completely.

God, I’ve missed this place. These woods are the only ground that ever held still under me, and after Miami chewed up my job, my apartment, and my carefully laminated five-year plan, this is exactly where I want to be.

I pull out my phone to send Grandma a photo of the view, and that’s my mistake, because the gallery opens on the last picture I looked at, three nights ago at two in the morning.

Jerry. He’s laughing in the photo, head tipped back, sawdust in his dark hair, my terribly knitted scarf around his neck because he wore it everywhere just to make me crazy. Twenty-three years old forever, standing in front of the old woodshed that probably doesn’t exist anymore.

He came to the lodge the summer I turned eighteen. One of the first men Grandma ever took through the program, back when the whole county told her she was insane to house convicts on her land, and he was proof that she was right. Gentle and funny and so determined to earn his way clean that he worked himself to the bone. Everyone told me not to fall for a man working off his sentence at my grandmother’s lodge. And they were right, yet I would do every hour of it again.

Six months after we got together, the woods took him back. A freak accident, everyone kept calling it, as if the words would help. He was clearing deadfall alone on a calm, windless morning, and a pine that had been struck by lightning the night before chose that hour to come down.

Tears sting my eyes, and I press my thumb to the edge of the screen like I could touch his jaw through it.

“I can hear you even now,” I whisper. “You know that?”

Stop looking in the past, Lucy. Go forward. Live your life. He started saying it our first month together, once he’d pulled the whole sad story out of me—the parents who left me on Grandma’s porch to never be seen again. The girl not even her own parents wanted. He’d take my face in both hands when I spiraled and say it slowly, like a spell. Forward. Live.