Page 32 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

I fell asleep smiling.

11

CHLOE

Iwoke up warm.

Not the surface warmth of blankets or morning sun through a window. This was the deep, body-level warmth that came from being wrapped around another human being, skin against skin, heartbeat against heartbeat. Sawyer’s arm was heavy across my waist, his chest pressed to my back, and his breathing was slow and even, the kind of breathing that said he was still asleep. Really asleep. The kind of sleep that doesn’t come with nightmares.

I lay still for a moment, letting myself exist in it. The cabin smelled like cedar and rain and him. The morning light came through the window in pale gold stripes, falling across the bed, across his forearm, across the place where our fingers were still loosely laced on the pillow.

Last night had changed everything. Not just the physical part, though that had been… I closed my eyes and felt the phantom echo of it, his hands, his mouth, the way he’d said my name like it was the only word he knew. But it was more than that. He had told me about Jimmy. He had cracked himself open and let me see inside, and what I’d found there was not the grumpy, closed-off man the world saw. What I’d found was someone who loved so deeply that losing it had nearly destroyed him.

I shifted carefully, turning in his arms until I was facing him. His face in sleep was softer than I’d ever seen it. The hard line of his jaw was relaxed, the furrow between his brows smoothed, and his lips were slightly parted. He looked younger. He looked peaceful. He looked like the man he might have been if the world had been kinder.

I leaned forward and pressed my lips to his forehead. Soft. Barely a whisper of contact. He didn’t stir.

I slipped out of bed, moving with the practiced stealth of a kindergarten teacher who had mastered the art of not waking sleeping children. I found his flannel shirt on the floor and pulled it on, buttoning it loosely, and padded barefoot to the kitchen.

My phone was on the table where I’d left it the night before. I picked it up and the screen lit with a notification. A text from Dad, sent at 6:47 AM.

Call me whenever you are available. It is something important.

My father was not a texter. He was a man who believed in phone calls and handshakes and looking people in the eye, and the fact that he had sent a text instead of calling meant he was being careful. Deliberate. The kind of careful that people are when the thing they need to say is too heavy for a casual ring.

A cold finger traced down my spine.

I pulled on the sweatpants from last night, the ones I’d had to cinch to keep up, and stepped outside. The cabin porch was small, just enough room for a man to sit with his coffee and look at the trees, and the morning air was sharp and clean from last night’s rain. The mountains were gold-tipped with early sun, and the sawmill yard below was quiet and wet, puddles shining like scattered mirrors.

I called my dad.

He answered on the second ring. “Chloe.”

One word. My name. And in the way he said it, in the slight crack at the edge of it, I knew.

“Dad, what’s wrong?”

A pause. The kind that lasts a lifetime. Then: “It’s your mother, sweetheart. She’s been having some tests done. She didn’t want to worry you, you know how she is, but the results came back yesterday.”

“What results?”

“It’s cancer, Chloe.” His voice broke on the word and he caught it, held it together with the same quiet strength he’d used to hold everything together for as long as I’d known him. “Stage four. Pancreatic. They say the treatment options are… limited, but we’re going to fight it. We’re going to fight it with everything we have.”

The porch railing was under my hands. I was gripping it, the wood rough against my palms, and the mountains were blurring because my eyes were full of something I couldn’t blink away.

“Chloe? Are you there?”

“I’m here.” My voice came out thin. Wrong. Like it belonged to someone else. “Dad, I’m coming home.”

“You don’t have to drop everything, honey. We know you have your life there, your job…”

“I’m coming home. Today. I’ll figure out the rest.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then, soft and tired and grateful: “Okay, baby. Okay.”

He gave me the hospital name. St. Catherine’s, in the oncology wing. Room 412. Mom was starting her first round of chemo on Monday. I wrote it all down on the back of my hand because my brain had stopped retaining information the moment he’d said the word cancer.

I hung up and stood on the porch, staring at the mountains, and the world looked exactly the same as it had five minutes ago but nothing was the same at all. My mother. My warm, singing, cinnamon-roll-making mother who danced in the kitchen and cried at Hallmark movies and had held my face in her hands the day I’d moved to Pinewood Ridge and said, “Go be brave, baby girl.” She was sick. She was really, deeply, terrifyingly sick, and she was in a hospital bed two hundred miles away and I was standing on a porch in borrowed sweatpants.