Page 40 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

I sat beside Dollie, took the wine she offered, and let myself feel, for the first time in years, something that wasn’t fear.

It felt like hope. Fragile and unfamiliar and terrifying.

But it was there.

14

SAWYER

The grocery list was three items long. Coffee. Bread. Eggs. The same three items it had been every week for seven years, because my life ran on a routine that required exactly this much variation and no more.

I parked the truck at the Pinewood Ridge Market, grabbed the list from the dash (I wrote it down every time, even though it never changed, because writing it down meant not having to think about it), and got out.

The afternoon was cool and gray, the kind of November day that couldn’t decide if it wanted to rain or snow and was settling for a general atmospheric hostility. The market parking lot was half empty. A few trucks. Mrs. Patterson’s ancient sedan. A blue minivan I didn’t recognize.

I went in, got my three items, paid, and walked out. Thirty seconds from the door to the truck. That was the goal. I did not linger. I did not browse. I did not make small talk with the cashier or examine the produce display or do any of the things that normal people did at grocery stores, because grocery stores involved other people and other people involved conversation and conversation involved the possibility of someone asking me how I was doing, and I did not have an answer to that question that wouldn’t make them regret asking.

I was twelve steps from my truck when I heard the scream.

Small. High. The kind of sound that comes from a throat too young to know how to be brave. It cut through the parking lot like a siren and made every nerve in my body go live.

I turned.

A kid. A little girl, maybe five or six, standing alone near the far edge of the parking lot where the gravel met the tree line. She had blonde hair in two messy braids and she was wearing a purple jacket with some kind of dinosaur patch on the sleeve, and she was looking around with the wide, panicked eyes of someone who had gotten separated from their person and was realizing, with the dawning horror unique to children, that she was alone.

She wasn’t alone.

A man was moving toward her from between the parked cars. Not walking. Moving, with the deliberate, angled approach of someone who didn’t want to be seen doing what they were about to do. He was big, dark jacket, a cap pulled low over his face, and his eyes were locked on the girl with an intensity that had nothing to do with concern.

Everything after that happened in the space between heartbeats.

I dropped the grocery bag. The eggs broke. I didn’t hear it. My body was already moving, crossing the parking lot in strides that ate the distance, my boots hitting gravel with the pounding rhythm of a machine engaging.

The man reached the girl first. His hand closed around her arm and she screamed again, louder this time, twisting and pulling with the desperate strength of a small animal caught in a trap.

“Let go of her.” My voice came out flat. Dead level. The voice that Josh called my “war voice,” the one that came from a place deeper than conscious thought, from years of training and muscle memory and the bone-deep reflex of a man who had been built to run toward the thing that everyone else ran from.

The man turned. His eyes found me, calculated, dismissed, decided I wasn’t worth the complication. He yanked the girl toward the tree line.

I hit him.

Not cleanly, not strategically, not with the controlled precision of a trained soldier. I hit him the way a man hits when a child is in danger and thinking is a luxury he can’t afford. My fist connected with the side of his jaw and he staggered, releasing the girl, who fell to the gravel and scrambled backward on her hands and knees.

The man recovered faster than I expected. He was trained. I could see it in the way he reset his stance, the way his weight shifted, the way his hand went to his waistband. Military or law enforcement or private security, someone who knew how to fight and had decided that fighting was on the menu.

The gun came out.

Small. Black. Held with the casual confidence of someone who had used it before. He didn’t point it at my head. He pointed it at my feet.

“Walk away,” he said.

“No.”

The shot was louder than I expected. A crack that split the afternoon open and sent birds scattering from the trees in a black, frantic cloud. The bullet hit the gravel two inches from my boot, and the spray of rock and dirt stung my ankle.

He adjusted his aim. “Last chance.”

I moved.