Page 23 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret
She laughed, gathered her jacket, and walked to the door. She paused in the frame, one hand on the wood, and looked back at me with those blue eyes that had somehow become the first thing I thought about in the morning and the last thing before sleep.
“Call me,” she said. “Or I’ll come back tomorrow and bring a loudspeaker.”
She left.
I stared at the doorway for a long time after she was gone. Then I picked up my phone, looked at the screen, and saved her number under a name I’d never admit to choosing.
Sunshine.
I put the phone in my pocket and went back to work.
I called her at nine that night. She answered on the first ring.
“Took you long enough, grumpy,” she said, and I could hear the smile in her voice.
We talked for two hours. I didn’t know I had two hours of words in me. Turns out, for her, I did.
8
CHLOE
Iwoke up and the ceiling was spinning.
Not the gentle, pleasant rotation that happens when you’ve had one glass of wine too many on a Friday night. This was the aggressive, full-commitment kind of spinning, the kind that made my stomach lurch and my brain feel like it had been stuffed with wet cotton. I pressed my palms against the mattress and tried to sit up. The room tilted sideways and I grabbed the headboard.
“Okay,” I whispered to no one. “This is not great.”
My throat felt like I’d swallowed sandpaper. My skin was simultaneously freezing and burning, alternating between shivers and waves of heat that made the sheets feel unbearable. When I pressed the back of my hand to my forehead, the heat radiating off it was enough to make me wince.
Fever. A real, genuine, no-question-about-it fever.
I checked the time. Six-fifteen in the morning. School started at eight. I had twenty-three five-year-olds who needed me, a lesson plan on weather patterns that involved cotton ball clouds and a very ambitious art project, and a field trip permission slip situation with Marcus’s mother that required the kind of diplomatic language normally reserved for international summits.
I tried to stand. My legs had other opinions. The floor rushed up at me and I caught myself on the nightstand, sending the water glass clattering.
“Okay, Chloe,” I said to myself, sitting back on the bed. “New plan.”
I called the school first. Mrs. Brennan answered with the crisp efficiency of a woman who had been running an elementary school for thirty years and had seen everything. I told her I was sick, she told me to rest, and within five minutes a substitute was confirmed. One problem solved.
The next problem was medicine. I opened the bathroom cabinet and stared at the barren shelves. Half a bottle of shampoo. A tube of toothpaste. Band-Aids. No ibuprofen. No cold medicine. No cough drops. Nothing useful for anything more serious than a paper cut.
I’d used the last of the ibuprofen weeks ago, the day after lugging Marcus’s science project (a papier-mache volcano that weighed roughly as much as an actual volcano) from the parking lot to the classroom. I’d been meaning to restock. I had not restocked.
My phone was on the nightstand. I picked it up and scrolled to Sawyer’s name before I’d fully processed the decision.
He answered on the second ring. “What do you want?”
Two weeks of phone calls between us and he still answered like that. No hello, no hey, no greeting of any kind. Just the blunt, gruff demand that had somehow become the sound I most wanted to hear.
“Are you busy?” My voice came out thin and scratchy, which annoyed me.
“Yes. Lots of things to do. The Henderson delivery got pushed up and the secondary saw is throwing alignment again.”
In the background, I could hear the mill. Machinery humming, metal on metal, the distant shout of someone calling out a measurement. Then Sawyer’s voice, slightly muffled like he’d pulled the phone away from his mouth: “Danny, if you stack those boards like that again, I will personally reload this entire truck myself and dock your pay for the time it takes.”
A pause. Then Danny’s voice, faint and chastened: “Yes, sir.”
Sawyer came back on the line. “What is it?”
