Page 79 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

“How?”

“The necklace.” She set Emma down on the couch, grabbed a blanket, wrapped it around her, and turned back to me. “I gave Chloe a necklace yesterday. It has a tracker in it.”

I stared at her. The words landed in my brain and rearranged themselves into something that looked a lot like hope, and the relief was so sudden and so sharp that it hurt.

“You put a tracker in a necklace.”

“I know Chloe,” Dollie said, and her voice cracked for the first time. “I have known her my whole life. I know what she does when the people she loves are in danger. She sacrifices herself. She has done it before. She did it when she married Jonathan to survive. She did it when she ran alone to protect Emma. I knew she would do it again if they pushed hard enough.” She pulled her phone from her pocket. Opened an app. Turned the screen toward me. A small blue dot, moving east on the highway. “So I planned for it.”

I looked at the dot. At Dollie. At this woman who had loved Chloe long enough and well enough to predict the worst and prepare for it, and something in my chest that was not quite gratitude and not quite rage settled into a hard, focused point.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Do not thank me. Get her back.”

Josh arrived with two of my crew members from the mill. Big men. Loyal men. The kind of men who showed up when it mattered and did not ask for explanations. He had already called the police. Two county units were en route. The sheriff had been contacted.

“I am going with them,” I said.

Josh looked at my shoulder. The sling. The bandage underneath that was holding together a wound less than forty-eight hours old.

“Sawyer, you are injured.”

“I am going with them.”

“The police can handle this.”

“I am going with them, Josh. She is my family. I need to make sure she is safe. I am not sitting in this house waiting for a phone call.”

Josh studied me. He knew that look. He had known me long enough to recognize when I was past the point of negotiation, when the decision had been made and the only question left was logistics. He nodded.

“Then I am driving,” he said.

Dollie stayed with Emma. She held my daughter on the couch and turned on the TV and pulled out the cookies and created the illusion of normalcy with the skill of a woman who understood that the best thing she could do for Emma right now was make the world feel safe while her father went to war.

I kissed Emma’s forehead.

“Be brave,” I said again.

“Bring Mama back,” she said.

“I will.”

We drove east. Josh behind the wheel. Me in the passenger seat with Dollie’s phone, tracking the blue dot that was Chloe, that was the necklace around her throat, that was the thread connecting me to the woman I refused to lose.

The dot had stopped. An address outside of town, twenty miles east, a property that appeared on the map as a large lot with a structure. A house, maybe. Or a warehouse. The kind of place you went when you did not want to be found.

The police met us a mile out. Two cruisers. Four officers. The sheriff, a man named Davis who had the weathered face and steady hands of someone who had worked mountain towns for three decades, pulled me aside.

“You should not be here, Mr. Cole.”

“I should not be a lot of places. I am here anyway.”

“This is a police operation.”

“And she is my wife.” The word came out without hesitation. Without correction. Because that was what she was, paperwork or not, ring or not, ceremony or not. She was my wife. “I am not asking to lead the charge. I am asking to be there when she comes out. I need her to see me. I need her to know I came.”

Davis looked at my sling. At my face. At whatever he saw behind my eyes that told him arguing was a waste of time.