Page 113 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

“Mama,” she said. “You look like a princess.”

“Thank you, baby.”

“Papa is going to cry.”

“You think so?”

“He cries at everything now. He cried at my school play. He cried when I lost my tooth. He cried when Captain Fluffington fell off the bed.”

“Captain Fluffington is fine.”

“Papa was not fine. He thought Captain Fluffington was hurt.” She paused. Looked at me with those green eyes that were so much like his, serious and searching. “Are you happy, Mama?”

I crouched down. Took her hands. Looked into the face of the child who had been the reason for everything, every choice, every sacrifice, every mile of running and every step of coming back.

“I am the happiest I have ever been,” I said.

She smiled. Wide and certain and carrying the full confidence of a child who had been told something she already knew.

“Good,” she said. “Because I already told everyone at school that my mama is marrying a lumberjack and they are very excited.”

The music started.

Dollie went first. Down the aisle with flowers in her hands and tears she was no longer trying to hide streaming down her face. Then Emma, my flower girl, walking carefully in her boot, scattering petals with the focused determination of a child performing the most important job in the world.

Then me.

The church was small. Wooden pews. Tall windows that let the mountain light pour in, golden and warm, filling the space with the kind of glow that did not need candles or decorations to be beautiful. The pews were filled with people. Sawyer’s crew, cleaned up and wearing the stunned expressions of men who owned one good shirt and were wearing it. Sawyer’s parents, his mother already weeping, his father holding her hand with the quiet, steady presence that his son had inherited. Josh, standing at the front beside Sawyer, his best man, solid and calm and wearing a tie for what I suspected was the third time in his life.

And Sawyer.

He was at the end of the aisle. Standing. Waiting. Wearing a dark suit that I had never seen him in before, fitted perfectly to his broad shoulders and his tall frame, and he looked like a different person and exactly the same person at once. His hair was combed. His jaw was clean. His hands were at his sides and his back was straight and his green eyes were locked on me with an intensity that stopped the air in my lungs.

I walked toward him.

Every step felt like a lifetime. Every step was a lifetime. Every step was a year compressed into a single movement, a year of his life and my life and the space between us that had been filled with war and loss and distance and silence and the kind of love that did not die no matter how hard you tried to kill it.

His face changed as I got closer. The composure cracked. The mask he wore for the world, the grumpy, stoic, impenetrable exterior that he maintained like a fortress, dissolved. His jaw tightened. His eyes went bright. And by the time I reached him, by the time I stood in front of him close enough to touch, his eyes were wet and his chin was trembling and he was the most beautiful man I had ever seen.

He took my hand. His grip was shaking the way it had shaken the night he proposed, the barely perceptible tremor of a man feeling more than his body could contain.

The ceremony was simple. The pastor spoke about love and commitment and the courage it takes to choose someone every day, and I heard the words but I was not listening to the words. I was listening to Sawyer’s breathing beside me. To the small sounds Emma was making from the front pew where she was whispering commentary to Sir Chomps-a-Lot about the proceedings. To the quiet sobs of Sawyer’s mother and the soft laughter of Dollie and the presence of every person in this room who had helped us get here.

We said our vows. The traditional ones. For better or worse. For richer or poorer. In sickness and in health. And every word felt different when you said them to someone who had already given you the worse and the poorer and the sickness and had stayed anyway. Every word felt earned. Every promise felt like a statement of fact rather than a hope.

“I do,” I said.

“I do,” he said.

The pastor said the words. Sawyer kissed me. Not the careful, public kiss of a man performing for an audience. A real kiss. Deep and slow and thorough, his hands on my face, his mouth on mine, kissing me in front of everyone he knew with the same intensity he kissed me when we were alone. The church erupted. Clapping. Whistling. Emma shouting “They are kissing again!” from the front pew.

We were married.

The reception was at the cabin. Our cabin. The one that had been destroyed and rebuilt and was now decorated with lights that Josh and the crew had strung through the trees around the property, turning the clearing into something out of a fairy tale. A long table set up outside. Food from everyone, dishes brought and shared, the collective effort of a community that had decided this family belonged to them.

We danced.

The first dance was in the clearing, on a wooden platform that Sawyer had built the week before, because of course he had built it, because the man expressed love through lumber and precision and the act of making something with his hands. The music was slow. The lights were soft. And I stood in his arms with my head against his chest and my hand in his and moved with him in the way we always moved, naturally and without effort, two bodies that had memorized each other’s rhythms.