Page 76 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

“Chloe.”

I stopped. Looked at him. His eyes were on me. Quiet. Watchful. The look of a man who knew something was wrong and was deciding whether to push.

He did not push. He took the bowl from my hands, set it on the table with his good hand, and said nothing. Just looked at me for a long moment, his expression unreadable, and then went back to the soup on his own.

I sat in the kitchen and tried to breathe.

Dollie came in the afternoon. She brought flowers for Sawyer, which he received with the enthusiasm of a man being handed a live snake, and cookies for Emma, which were received with significantly more excitement. She squeezed Sawyer’s good shoulder, told him he looked terrible, and then turned to me with the bright, assessing gaze of a woman who had been my best friend for long enough to know when I was drowning.

“How are you holding up?” she asked.

“Fine.”

“You look like you have not slept in a week.”

“I am fine, Dollie.”

She updated us on the police investigation. They were tracking the men from the sawmill. Josh had given statements. The crew had given statements. There were tire tracks and shell casings and enough evidence to build a case, but Jonathan himself remained untouched, operating through layers of hired men and plausible deniability the way he always had.

Dollie tried to lighten the mood. She told a story about Josh trying to fix the garbage disposal and flooding the kitchen. She made Emma laugh by doing impressions of the animals on Emma’s favorite TV show. She was bright and warm and filling the room with the kind of energy that usually pulled me out of whatever dark place I had crawled into.

But I could not stay present. My mind kept drifting. Circling back to the produce aisle. To the man’s flat voice. To the equation that had no good answer.

I was staring at the wall when Dollie’s hand touched my arm.

“Hey,” she said. Softer now. The jokes gone. “Where did you go?”

“What?”

“You have been pacing out for the last twenty minutes. I told a joke about Josh and the toilet and you did not even blink. That joke always gets you.”

“I am just tired.”

“Chloe.”

“I am worried about him. That is all.”

Dollie looked at me. Long and steady. The kind of look that stripped away the deflection and the smiles and went straight to the thing underneath, and I felt exposed in a way that made my throat tight.

“Can we talk outside?” Dollie said.

We stepped onto the porch. The evening air was cold, biting, the kind of mountain cold that cleared your head whether you wanted it cleared or not. Dollie closed the door behind us and leaned against the railing and waited.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Nothing happened.”

“Do not lie to me. Something happened between this morning and right now, and it was not the groceries.”

My eyes stung. I looked at the trees. At the gravel driveway. At the mountains standing patient and immovable against the darkening sky.

“Nothing,” I said. “I am just worried. About Sawyer. About Emma. About all of it.”

Dollie was quiet for a long moment. She did not push. She never pushed the way other people pushed, with demands and ultimatums. She waited. She made space. And she trusted that I would fill it when I was ready.

I was not ready. Not yet. The words were trapped behind my ribs, tangled up with fear and guilt and the desperate arithmetic of a mother trying to calculate the cost of keeping her family alive.

Dollie reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out something small. A necklace. A thin silver chain with a small pendant, simple and delicate, the kind of thing you would wear every day without thinking about it.