Page 93 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

“It means being away from the mill during the day. Emma will be at the school and I will be down the hall and…”

“Chloe.”

“What?”

“Take the job.”

I kissed him. Quick and warm, right there among the sawdust and the timber, and when I pulled back there was something on his face that I had never seen before. Not a smile. Something bigger. Something that looked like pride.

“I am going to take the job,” I said.

“Good.”

“I am still going to cook for your crew.”

“They would mutiny if you stopped.”

I laughed. He almost smiled. And in the space between my laugh and his almost-smile, the future shifted into something brighter, something that included classrooms and children and the version of myself that I had thought was lost forever but had only been waiting, patient and steady, for the day I was brave enough to come back to her.

33

SAWYER

Months passed and nothing broke.

That was the miracle. The quiet, unspectacular miracle of days turning into weeks turning into months without a threat or a phone call or a truck full of men with bad intentions. The police patrols continued. The security system at the cabin blinked green every night. Jonathan Marshall was still out there somewhere, a loose thread that the authorities had not yet pulled, but the thread had gone slack. No contact. No messages. No carved warnings.

The fear did not disappear. It lived in the back of my mind like a low hum, a frequency I had learned to operate on without letting it consume me. But the volume had dropped. And in the space that opened up when the fear went quiet, something else grew. Something normal. Something good.

Chloe started teaching in January. I watched her leave the cabin that first morning in a blouse and slacks with her hair done and her bag over her shoulder and a nervousness in her eyes that she tried to hide and could not, and I thought she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. She came home that evening talking so fast I could not keep up, her hands moving, her face glowing, telling me about the classroom and the children and the way a little boy named Marcus had held her hand during story time and refused to let go.

She was built for that work. I had known it before, but watching it happen, watching her light up every morning and come home full every evening, confirmed something I did not need confirmed. Chloe Matthews was a teacher the way I was a builder. It was not what she did. It was who she was.

Emma was at the same school. Down the hall from her mother’s classroom, in a first-grade class with a teacher named Mrs. Peterson who wore reading glasses on a chain and called every child sweetheart. Emma thrived. She made friends fast, the way she did everything fast, with a confidence that I recognized as her mother’s gift and a stubbornness that I was forced to acknowledge was mine. She came home with stories and drawings and increasingly complex opinions about the superiority of purple over every other color.

The months built themselves into a life. A routine. The kind of routine that people take for granted when they have never lived without one, and that people like me and Chloe treated like something precious and fragile, because we knew how quickly routines could shatter.

I picked them up from school on a Tuesday afternoon.

The truck pulled into the school lot and I could see them before I parked. Chloe standing at the front entrance with her bag on her shoulder, talking to another teacher, her hands moving the way they did when she was animated. Emma beside her, crouched on the ground, showing Sir Chomps-a-Lot something in the grass, probably a bug, probably something that would end up in a jar on the kitchen counter by bedtime.

I honked once. Emma’s head snapped up and the grin that broke across her face was the kind of thing that made me understand why people believed in God. She grabbed her backpack and sprinted toward the truck with the full-speed, no-hesitation commitment of a child who had not yet learned to be casual about anything.

“Papa!” She climbed into the back seat with the agility of a monkey and immediately began talking. “Marcus brought a lizard to school and Mrs. Peterson screamed and the lizard got loose and we had to find it and I found it under the bookshelf and Marcus said I am the bravest person he knows.”

“That sounds accurate.”

“Also I got an A on my spelling test and I can spell dinosaur now. D-I-N-O-S-A-U-R. Did you know it has eight letters?”

“I did not.”

“It does. Eight. That is a lot of letters for one animal.”

Chloe got in the passenger side. She leaned over and kissed my cheek and the smell of her, vanilla and chalk and the faint trace of the hand sanitizer that lived on every surface in a kindergarten classroom, was the smell of my life now. My real life. The one I had not known I was waiting for.

“How was your day?” she asked.

“Productive. Yours?”