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“I really am.”
Mary Sue, still at the stove, didn’t turn around. But her shoulders shook with quiet laughter.
She got up a few minutes later to refill her mug and drifted, almost against her will to the window over the sink. She never could help it anymore. Whenever he was outside, she ended up here, watching. She’d stopped pretending she wasn’t.
Cal stood at the chopping block, axe flashing in the cold winter light. The blade came down clean and powerful, splitting a thick round of wood with a sharp crack that carried through the glass. Snow dusted his dark hair and bare shoulders, melting instantly against his heated skin. His powerful back and arms flexed with every swing, muscles shifting and bunching under a faint sheen of sweat that made him steam faintly in the crisp air. The low winter sun caught on the ridges of his abdomen, the strong V of his hips disappearing into his jeans, and the way his biceps bulged as he lifted another log like it weighed nothing.
God, look at him.
Brutus lounged ten yards behind him, sprawled on his back in the fresh powder, gnawing meditatively on something that might have been a stick and might have been half a small tree. Hard to tell from here.
Cal set another round upright, swung, split it clean. Set another. Swung. Split.
Same axe, Sage thought, the realization dropping into her chest fully formed. Different home.
She stood very still at the window, hands wrapped around the warm mug, and let herself see it — not just the man, but the boy he used to be. A twelve-year-old with those same broad shoulders and that same axe, chopping wood for a mother who was dying inside a different house a long time ago. A boy who went home every night to silence and shadows.
But this Cal — her Cal, her husband — swung the axe with quiet joy. No tension in his jaw. No ghosts riding his back. The demons that had haunted him for decades were finally quiet, laid to rest somewhere between the ridge where he proposed and the hot spring where he gave himself to her completely.
Same axe. Different home. Different life.
A soft, aching smile curved her lips.
My love…
She watched him for another long minute, just because she could. The flex of his back, the easy power in every swing, the way snowflakes caught in his short beard and melted against his warm skin. Her thighs pressed together instinctively at the memory of those same arms holding her down on this very kitchen table only hours ago.
Then she set the mug down carefully on the counter, let out a slow breath, and went back to the island.
Isabelle was still talking about peonies.
She was the one who answered when the landline rang.
Cal kept an old rotary phone because cell service up here was a coin flip on a good day, because Mary Sue kept one, and because he liked the nostalgia of it. Sage also knew there were a handful of people who had been calling this number since he built the place— people he would never change it for, no matter what.
Sage picked it up without thinking, mug still warm in her other hand, Isabelle mid-sentence about chair rentals behind her.
“Hello?”
A pause on the other end. A man’s voice, deeper than she expected. Calm in a way that prickled at the back of her neck before she could explain why.
“I’m sorry, ma’am. I think I may have the wrong number. I was looking for Calvin Meridian.”
“No, you’ve got the right number.” She set her mug down. “He’s outside. Can I tell him who’s calling?”
Another pause. Shorter this time. Then, almost careful:
“Tell him it’s Cross, ma’am. He’ll know.”
Cross. The name lit something at the edge of her memory. Cal had mentioned it once or twice, in passing, the way he spoke about people who lived in a part of his life she hadn’t been let into yet. Not a stranger. Not exactly a friend. Something else.
“Hold on a sec,” she said. “Let me grab him.”
She set the phone down on the counter and moved — not running, but close.
Out the back door. The cold hit her bare legs under the flannel like a slap, but she barely felt it. Cal was lining up another log when he saw her coming and stopped mid-swing, axe lowering to his side. Snow dusted his bare shoulders and beard.
“Baby?”
