Page 42 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

“Please, Mama,” Emma said. “He needs help. I owe him my life.”

I looked at the girl. My voice, when it came, was steadier than I had any right to be. “You don’t owe me anything, kid.”

“His name’s Sawyer,” the security guard offered helpfully, reading from the driver’s license he’d apparently found in the wallet that had fallen out of my jacket during the fight.

“Sawyer,” Emma repeated, testing the name. “Mama, please. Can we help him?”

Chloe looked at her daughter. Then at me. Then at the blood seeping steadily from my boot, forming a dark pool on the gravel. Behind the shock and the years and whatever storm was raging behind her eyes, something resolved. A decision made. The particular set of her jaw that I recognized from a lifetime ago, the one that meant Chloe Matthews had chosen her course and the world could get on board or get out of the way.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “We can help him.”

The ambulance arrived. They loaded me onto a stretcher despite my insistence that I could walk, which I could not, and drove me to Pinewood Ridge General while Chloe followed in her car with Emma in the back seat, pressing her face to the window to make sure the ambulance was still in front of them.

The hospital was small. The doctor was thorough. The bullet fragment had lodged in the soft tissue on top of my foot, missing bone and tendon by margins that the doctor described as “lucky” and I described as “adequate.” They extracted it, stitched me up, and gave me crutches and a prescription for painkillers I wouldn’t fill.

“You’ll need help for the next few weeks,” the doctor said, reading from his clipboard with the particular authority of a man accustomed to patients who didn’t listen. “No weight on that foot. No driving. No work. Someone needs to be with you to assist with daily tasks.”

“I’ll be fine on my own.”

“You will not be fine on your own. You will tear your stitches, get an infection, and end up back here, and I will be significantly less pleasant the second time.”

Emma was sitting in the chair beside my bed. She’d been there since they’d let her in, watching the entire medical process with the rapt fascination of a child who had decided that hospitals were the most interesting place she’d ever been. She looked up at the doctor, then at me, then at her mother, who was standing by the door with her arms crossed and her face unreadable.

“Mama,” Emma said, “can we help him? I owe him my life.”

“You don’t owe me anything,” I said again.

“You saved me from the bad man,” Emma said, with the iron certainty of a six-year-old who has made up her mind. “That’s a life debt. I read about it in a book.”

Chloe looked at her daughter. Looked at me. The air between us was thick with seven years of silence and the questions neither of us was asking. Her jaw worked. Her hands tightened on her arms.

“Okay,” she said. Her voice was quiet. Careful. Held together with the same steely control I remembered from a woman who had once told me to sit down and eat soup. “We’ll help.”

Emma beamed. I looked at the ceiling. Chloe looked at the floor.

And somewhere in the space between us, something that had been dead for seven years stirred.

15

CHLOE

Emma was asleep.

She was curled in the hospital chair with Sir Chomps-a-Lot wedged between her body and the armrest, her braids loose around her face, her small sneakers dangling above the floor. One hand rested on the edge of Sawyer’s bed railing, like she’d been holding on and sleep had taken her before she’d thought to let go. The bruise on her arm from where the man had grabbed her was already darkening, a shadow on her small skin that made something inside me want to burn the world down.

I pulled the thin hospital blanket over her legs and tucked it around her shoulders. She didn’t stir. She was exhausted, the kind of deep, boneless exhaustion that comes after fear and adrenaline and the particular intensity of a six-year-old who had decided that a grumpy stranger in a hospital bed was her personal responsibility.

I stood there watching her breathe for a moment. Then I turned to Sawyer.

He was propped against the pillows, his bandaged foot elevated, his jaw tight with the pain he was refusing to acknowledge. The painkillers the doctor had offered were sitting untouched on the bedside tray. Of course they were. Sawyer Cole would rather chew through his own arm than admit he needed help.

“She’s out,” I said quietly, nodding toward Emma.

“She fought it hard enough.”

“She wanted to make sure you were okay. She takes her life debts seriously, apparently.”

His eyes moved to Emma’s sleeping face, studying her for a moment with an expression I couldn’t quite read. Then he looked at me, and the look shifted into something heavier. Something that had been waiting.