Page 5 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

I let go of the door handle.

Without a word, I walked to the table and sat down. The chair was small, meant for someone half my size, and my knees bumped the underside of the table. I picked up the spoon and ate.

The soup was good. Chicken and vegetables with some kind of herb I couldn’t name. It was hot and simple and it settled my stomach in a way the aspirin alone couldn’t have. I ate without looking at her, focused on the bowl, but I could feel her watching me from where she’d moved to lean against the kitchen counter.

“So,” she said after I’d eaten about half the bowl. “What happened last night?”

I kept my eyes on the soup. “Friend’s birthday party. I don’t know what happened after that.”

“You were outside Murphy’s. On the sidewalk.”

“Like I said. I don’t know what happened.”

A pause. Then, softer: “You were talking in your sleep. Or, well, your unconscious state. About someone named Jimmy.”

My spoon stopped. I set it down carefully, precisely, like the act of placing it on the table required all of my concentration. “That’s not your business.”

“You’re right,” she said. “It’s not.”

I expected her to push. People always pushed. They pried, they asked follow-up questions, they gave you that look that was half sympathy and half morbid curiosity. But she didn’t. She just let the silence sit there, comfortable as an old blanket, and after a moment she picked up a mug from the counter and took a sip of whatever was in it.

“Where do you live?” she asked. “I’ve never seen you around here. And I know most people in Pinewood Ridge, or at least I know them well enough to wave.”

“East side. Past the sawmill.” The words came out clipped, automatic. “I keep to myself.”

“Shocking,” she said, and there was something in her voice, a warmth, a lightness, that told me she was teasing. Not meanly. The way you’d tease someone you’d already decided you liked, even if they hadn’t given you reason to.

I finished the soup. Set the spoon in the empty bowl. Looked at her for the first time since sitting down.

She was smiling again, smaller this time, tucked into one corner of her mouth like a secret she was keeping. The morning light caught the side of her face and I noticed, despite my best efforts not to notice anything, that she was pretty. Not in the polished, obvious way that demanded attention. In the quieter way that snuck up on you. The kind of pretty that had less to do with symmetry and more to do with the way she existed in a space, like she belonged wherever she stood.

I pushed back from the table.

“Are you always like that?” she asked as I stood.

“Like what?”

“So grumpy in the morning. Or do you just specifically not like talking to me?”

Something about the way she asked it, direct, curious, completely unintimidated, caught me off guard. Most people took one look at my face and decided not to bother. She was looking at my face and deciding to bother anyway.

“Just this,” I said. “No hard feelings.”

She tilted her head, studying me the way she probably studied whatever small humans she was clearly in charge of educating. I could practically see the assessment happening behind those blue eyes.

“Okay,” she said simply. “No hard feelings.”

I picked up my boots from by the door, sat on the floor to pull them on because the room was too small for me to balance on one foot without knocking something over, and laced them up. She didn’t offer to help. She just sipped her drink and watched, and somehow her not helping felt more respectful than anyone else’s helping ever had.

I stood, my hand on the doorknob.

“Hey.”

I stopped.

“Where’s my thank you?”

I turned back. She was leaning against the counter with her arms crossed, one eyebrow raised, waiting. Patient as the aspirin she’d left by the bed.