Page 41 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

Not away. Toward. My hand found his wrist and twisted, the gun went sideways, and the second shot went into the air. We fought, close and ugly, his fist connecting with my ribs, my elbow catching his temple. The gun spun across the gravel. I pinned him, my weight on his chest, my fist pulled back for the strike that would end it.

Then: pain. Sharp, hot, blooming in my left foot with a suddenness that made my vision white out. The first bullet hadn’t missed. It had ricocheted, a fragment catching the top of my foot, and the adrenaline had buried it until now, when my body decided to cash the check.

My grip loosened. He shoved me off, scrambled to his feet, and ran. Into the trees. Gone.

I sat on the gravel, my foot screaming, my ribs throbbing, and my hands shaking with the adrenaline comedown that always hit like a freight train after the fight was over. Blood was pooling in my boot, warm and persistent, and the parking lot was filling with sounds I’d been too focused to hear: shouts from inside the market, the wail of a car alarm set off by the gunshots, the distant beginning of a siren.

“Mister?”

I looked up.

The girl was standing in front of me. She’d come back. This tiny human, who had just been grabbed by a stranger in a parking lot, had run to the security guard at the market entrance and then come back. For me. She was looking at me with brown eyes that were too old for her face, eyes that had seen things a six-year-old should never see, and her expression was a complicated mix of fear and worry and something that looked remarkably like determination.

“Are you okay?” she asked. Her voice was shaking but her chin was up.

“I’m fine,” I said, which was a lie that she clearly didn’t believe, because she looked at the blood soaking through my boot and her eyes went wide.

“You’re not fine. You’re bleeding.”

“It’s just a scratch.”

“That’s a lot of blood for a scratch.” She knelt down next to me with the authority of a child who had decided she was in charge of the situation. “You helped me. You fought the bad guys. I want to make sure you’re going to be okay.”

The security guard arrived, breathless and carrying a first aid kit that was clearly designed for paper cuts and not gunshot wounds. Behind him, more people were gathering, the usual crowd that materialized after the danger had passed.

And then.

Running footsteps. Fast. Desperate. The sound of someone who had heard a scream and had been running toward it ever since.

“Emma! Emma!”

The voice hit me before the sight did. It went through me like electricity, lighting up neural pathways that had been dormant for seven years. I knew that voice the way I knew the sound of the mill, the way I knew the grain of cedar, the way I knew my own heartbeat. I had heard it in my sleep. I had heard it in the silence of the cabin on nights when the memories pressed close. I had heard it say my name in a hundred different ways, and every single one had left a mark.

She came around the corner of the market at a full sprint, her hair flying, her face white with terror, and she dropped to her knees beside the girl and pulled her into an embrace so tight that both of them swayed.

“Emma, oh God, Emma, are you okay? Are you hurt? Where did you go? I told you to stay by the cart, I turned around for one second…”

“Mama, I’m okay,” the girl said, her voice muffled against her mother’s chest. “The man helped me. He fought the bad guys, Mama. But he’s hurt. Look.”

Chloe lifted her head.

Her eyes found mine.

Seven years collapsed into nothing. Every mile, every month, every sleepless night, every morning I’d woken up alone in a cabin that still smelled like her, all of it compressed into the single, electric second of her eyes meeting mine across a blood-spattered parking lot.

She looked different. Older, thinner, with shadows under her eyes that hadn’t been there before and a wariness in her expression that was new. But her eyes were the same. Blue as summer sky, blue as the lake in the mountains, blue as the thing I’d been missing for seven years and had never stopped looking for.

“Sawyer,” she breathed. My name. Barely a whisper. Like she’d seen a ghost.

“Mom, can we take him to the hospital?” Emma pulled at Chloe’s sleeve, insistent. “He saved me. He fought the bad guys. I want to make sure he’s going to be okay.”

Chloe was staring at me. I was staring at her. The parking lot, the people, the security guard with his useless first aid kit, the siren getting closer, all of it had faded to background noise. There was only her face and the years between us and the child beside her who had my mother’s blonde hair and eyes that were…

Green.

Dark, deep green. Pine-needle green. The same green that looked back at me from the mirror every morning.

The ground shifted under me, and this time it had nothing to do with the bullet in my foot.