Page 36 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

“Where is she?” I asked before she could speak. I’d gotten out of the truck and my voice sounded like gravel that had been run over by another truck. “Dollie, where did she go?”

Dollie looked at me. Her eyes were red, which meant she’d been crying, which meant this was worse than I’d thought.

“I don’t know,” she said. “She filed an immediate resignation. Called the school yesterday and quit. Her apartment is cleared out. She didn’t tell me where she was going.”

“She didn’t call you?”

“She texted. Two words. ‘Mom’s sick.’ That’s it.”

Her mother was sick. The information landed with a thud, rearranging the picture I’d been assembling. It wasn’t just Rachel. It wasn’t just the misunderstanding on the porch. Something else had happened, something bigger, and Chloe had been hit from two directions at once.

“Her mother has cancer,” Dollie said, her voice cracking. “I found out from her neighbor in Denver. Stage four. Pancreatic.”

The ground shifted again. Everything I’d been feeling, the anger, the hurt, the burning, righteous confusion about why she hadn’t let me explain, all of it rearranged itself around this new fact. She hadn’t just run from me. She’d run toward her mother. She’d been standing on my porch, still warm from my bed, and her father had told her that her mother was dying, and then Rachel had appeared and said the words “my boyfriend,” and the world had collapsed on her from every side at once.

And she’d done the only thing she knew how to do. The thing she’d told me about on a rainy night in my cabin, the thing that defined her at her core: she’d handled it herself. Alone. The way she’d always handled everything.

“I need to find her,” I said.

Dollie shook her head. “She doesn’t want to be found, Sawyer. Not right now. Trust me, I know her. If she’s not answering your calls, pushing harder will make it worse.”

“So, what? I just wait? I just stand here and hope she comes back?”

“I don’t know.” Dollie’s chin trembled. She pressed her lips together and held it. “I don’t know what you do. But I know she’s hurting, and I know pushing her when she’s like this is the wrong move.”

She walked away. I stood in the yard and watched her go.

Then I went inside the mill and picked up the heaviest piece of lumber I could find and worked until my hands bled and my muscles screamed and the pain on the outside was loud enough to compete with the silence she’d left on the inside.

It wasn’t enough.

It was never enough.

But I did it anyway, because Sawyer Cole knew how to survive things that should have killed him. He’d done it before. He’d do it again.

The cabin that night was impossible. Every surface held her. The kitchen where she’d made pancakes. The table where I’d told her about Jimmy. The bed where she’d lain beside me and whispered “goodnight, grumpy” and fallen asleep with my heartbeat under her hand.

I sat in the chair by the window and looked at the picture of Jimmy on the bookshelf. His grinning face. His easy laugh.

“She left,” I told him. “Just like everyone does.”

Jimmy didn’t answer. He never did. But in the silence of the cabin, with the first snow of November falling soft and white outside the window, I thought I heard something that sounded like my brother’s voice saying: Don’t give up on her, you stubborn idiot.

I didn’t sleep.

I didn’t sleep for a long time.

13

CHLOE

Seven years.

The divorce papers sat on the kitchen table, approved and stamped and bearing the seal of the Denver County Court. Final. Done. I stared at them for a long time, reading the words without really seeing them, because the words didn’t matter as much as what they meant. Freedom. Safety. The end of the worst chapter of my life, printed on paper and signed by a judge who had never met me but had just given me back my future.

I took a deep breath.

It came out shaking. Long and unsteady and carrying a weight that I hadn’t realized was sitting on my lungs until it lifted. Three years of marriage to Jonathan Perry, son of Mayor Gerald Perry, golden boy of Denver’s political elite, and the single worst decision I had ever made. Three years, reduced to a stack of legal documents and a stamp that said dissolved.