Page 92 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

Sawyer glared at him. The full glare. The one that could strip paint off a barn door and that had absolutely no effect on Josh because Josh had been absorbing that glare since they were young and had developed a complete and total immunity.

I walked back to Sawyer. Wrapped my arms around his waist. Pressed my face into his chest and held on, feeling the tension in his body, the stiffness of a man who had just been publicly outranked by a woman a foot shorter than him.

“Don’t be mad,” I said.

His arm came around me. Slow. Reluctant. And then not reluctant at all, his grip tightening, his chin resting on top of my head, the surrender happening in stages the way it always did with Sawyer, grudging on the outside and total on the inside.

“How can I be mad at you,” he said. Not a question. A statement of fact. A man acknowledging a truth he had accepted long ago and was only now learning to say out loud.

We ate together. All of us. The crew and Sawyer and Josh and Emma, who sat on her stack of crates with her hard hat and her plate and told anyone who would listen about the dinosaur museum she was planning to build, which had expanded in scope since the last time she described it and now apparently required government funding. The men listened with the serious attention of adults who had been completely charmed by a six-year-old and saw no reason to resist.

Sawyer ate beside me. Quiet. His hand found mine between bites and held it, and every few minutes he looked at me with an expression that was trying very hard to be annoyed about the boss comment and failing completely because underneath the grumpy exterior was a man who had just watched the woman he loved feed his crew with food she had made with her own hands in the home they had rebuilt, and there was no version of that story that ended with him being angry.

I was cleaning up the containers when Dollie’s truck pulled into the lot.

She was not alone.

There was a woman in the passenger seat. Older, with gray hair pulled back neatly and reading glasses hanging from a chain around her neck. She carried herself with the kind of quiet authority that came from decades of working with children and running a building full of them. She got out of the truck and looked around the mill with polite curiosity, the way someone looks at a place they are visiting for the first time and are determined to be respectful about.

“Chloe!” Dollie crossed the yard with her usual energy, a force of nature in boots and red hair. “Come here. I want you to meet someone.”

I walked over, wiping my hands on a cloth.

“This is Margaret Wells,” Dollie said. “She is the principal at Pinewood Elementary.”

Margaret extended her hand. Her grip was firm. Her eyes were warm but sharp, the kind that had spent thirty years reading children and could read an adult in half the time.

“Ms. Matthews,” Margaret said. “Dollie has told me a great deal about you.”

“Whatever she told you, I was probably less dramatic about it than she made it sound.”

Margaret smiled. “She told me you are a kindergarten teacher. One of the best she has ever known.”

The words hit me in a place I had not expected. A soft place. A bruised one. The place where the woman I used to be still lived, the woman who stood in front of a classroom full of five-year-olds and helped them discover the world, the woman who had been buried under years of survival and fear and running.

“I was,” I said. “Before everything.”

“We have an opening,” Margaret said. “Our kindergarten teacher is retiring at the end of this term. I need someone who loves children, who understands how they learn, and who can build a classroom that feels safe. Dollie seems to think you are that person.”

I wanted it. The want hit me so hard and so fast that it stole my breath. I wanted a classroom. I wanted small hands raising in the air with questions. I wanted the smell of crayons and construction paper and the sound of twenty voices singing the alphabet slightly out of tune. I wanted to be a teacher again. I wanted to be myself again.

“I would love that,” I said, and the steadiness of my voice surprised me because underneath it was a storm of longing so fierce it could have knocked me down. “I miss teaching. I miss it more than I can tell you.”

“Then come to the school next week. We will do a proper interview, but I have a good feeling about this.”

Margaret shook my hand again. Spoke with Dollie for a moment. Got back in the truck. And as they drove away, I stood in the sawmill yard with the empty food containers at my feet and the mountain air on my face and felt something bloom in my chest that I had not felt in years. Purpose. Direction. A future that was about more than staying alive.

I found Sawyer by the main building. He was back at work, measuring and marking, his focus returned to the lumber with the single-minded intensity that made him the best at what he did. He looked up when I approached and his eyes did that thing they always did, reading me in an instant, cataloging every shift in my expression.

“Margaret Wells from Pinewood Elementary just offered me a teaching job,” I said.

He set down the pencil. Gave me his full attention. And the look on his face, quiet and steady and warm, told me he already knew what I wanted before I said it.

“I support whatever you want,” he said.

“Really? Just like that?”

“Just like that. You are a teacher, Chloe. That is who you are. You have been trying to get back to it since the day I met you. Take the job.”