Chapter 4
SAWYER
She came back.
Of course she came back. Because the universe, in its infinite and highly specific cruelty, had decided that my life needed a five-foot-five complication with blue eyes and zero respect for personal boundaries.
I saw her before she saw me. It was the end of the day, the sun dropping behind the tree line and painting everything in shades of amber, and I was checking the blade alignment on the secondary saw when Josh’s voice carried across the yard, bright and stupid with that tone he only used for one person.
“Babe! You brought more?”
I didn’t look up. I didn’t need to. I could hear the other voice, the friend, Dollie, laughing and saying something about how she’d tried a new recipe. And then, underneath that, a different voice. Warmer. Louder. Closer.
“We are right on time, grumpy.”
I looked up.
She was walking toward me across the yard with the kind of purpose that most people reserved for things they were actually invited to.
Her hair was down today, falling past her shoulders in waves that caught the last of the daylight, and she was wearing a jacket over one of those soft sweaters that looked like they’d been designed specifically for someone who hugged children for a living.
She was smiling, and the smile was aimed directly at me like a weapon she had no intention of putting down.
“Don’t you dare touch me again, woman,” I said.
The words came out harder than I intended.
Or maybe they came out exactly as hard as I intended, because the memory of yesterday, her lips on my cheek, the shock of it, the warmth, the way my skin had burned for an hour afterward, had been playing on a loop in my head since it happened.
I’d spent the entire night in my workshop, building a bookshelf I didn’t need, trying to sand her out of my thoughts. It hadn’t worked.
She stopped in front of me, unbothered. Completely, totally, infuriatingly unbothered. She held up a small paper bag.
“I just want to give you cookies too,” she said.
“For what?”
“Just for you to feel a little better. You need some sweetness in your life.” She held the bag out, the paper crinkling. “I bought them from Mabel’s. The ones with the brown butter and sea salt. Dollie said they’re the best in town.”
“I don’t like cookies.”
“Everyone likes cookies.”
“I don’t.”
“Have you ever actually tried not being difficult, or is it a full-time commitment?”
I set down the wrench I’d been holding and straightened to my full height, which put a solid ten inches between us.
It was a move that worked on most people.
Delivery drivers, new employees, the occasional tourist who wandered too close to the equipment.
Height plus silence plus a flat stare was usually enough to send anyone backing up with an apology.
She tilted her head up and looked at me like I’d done something cute.
“Please,” she said. “Just take them. I bought them for you. It would be rude to let them go to waste.”
“I didn’t ask you to buy me anything.”
“You didn’t ask me to save you from a frozen sidewalk either, and yet here we are, both alive and having this conversation. Funny how that works.”
Something twisted in my chest. Not anger. Not exactly. Something more complicated, something with too many edges to name.
I started to walk away. Turn around, go back to the mill, put a building and several large pieces of machinery between me and this woman and her paper bag and her smile.
Her hand caught my arm.
It was light, barely more than her fingertips grazing the fabric of my sleeve, but the contact jolted through me like a current.
My body reacted before my brain caught up.
I flinched, hard, my arm jerking away with the automatic, hair-trigger reflex of a man who had spent too many years in places where unexpected contact meant danger.
My elbow caught her.
Not hard. Not full force. But enough. Enough to knock her off balance, enough to send her stumbling sideways, enough that her foot caught on the uneven ground and she went down.
She hit the dirt with a soft thud and a sharp intake of breath.
The world stopped.
For a full second, everything ceased to exist except the image of her on the ground. Sitting in the sawdust, one palm pressed flat against the dirt, the other braced on her knee. Her face was turned away from me, her hair falling forward like a curtain.
I had done that. I had knocked her down. A woman half my size who had been trying to give me cookies.
The shame was instant and devastating. It flooded through me like ice water, drowning out everything else, the stubbornness, the walls, the careful armor I wore like a second skin.
For one terrible moment, I was back in a place I didn’t want to be, a place where flinching was survival and the cost was always paid by someone else.
She looked up at me. Her eyes were wide, but not with fear. With surprise. Raw, unfiltered surprise, like she was processing what had just happened and hadn’t yet decided what to feel about it.
“Okay,” she said quietly. “I won’t push.”
She started to get up, brushing the sawdust off her palms, and that’s when I saw it. Her left knee, visible through a tear in her jeans that hadn’t been there a moment ago. The skin was scraped, a raw, red patch dotted with tiny beads of blood, the kind of wound that stung more than it bled.
I did that.
“Let’s go eat over there, Dollie,” she called out, her voice steady, casual, like nothing had happened. Like she hadn’t just been knocked to the ground by a man twice her size. She picked up the paper bag of cookies from where it had fallen and tucked it under her arm.
“Wait.”
The word came out of me before I could stop it. Rough and low, catching in my throat.
She paused. Looked at me over her shoulder.
“Give me the cookies,” I said.
Something shifted in her face. The surprise softened into something else, something warm and knowing that I wasn’t prepared for. She turned fully, walked back to me, and held out the bag.
I took it.
Her smile came back, but different this time. Gentler. Less like a weapon and more like a lamp in a window. “Enjoy.”
She turned and walked toward where Dollie and Josh were sitting on the stack of lumber near the break area. She was limping, just slightly, favoring her right leg, and the guilt hit me so hard I could taste it.
I stood there for a moment, holding a bag of cookies I’d said I didn’t want, watching her walk away. Then I set the bag on the nearest flat surface, went into the office, and grabbed the first aid kit from the shelf above the desk.
They were sitting together when I got there.
Josh and Dollie side by side, and Chloe a few feet away, perched on a lower stack of lumber with her legs stretched out in front of her.
She was examining her knee with the same detached curiosity she probably used when one of her students showed her a bug.
I stopped in front of her and dropped to one knee.
She blinked down at me. “What are you doing?”
I didn’t answer. I opened the first aid kit, pulled out an antiseptic wipe, and tore the packet open. Then I looked at her knee, at the torn denim and the raw skin underneath, and something in my jaw tightened so hard my teeth ached.
“This might sting,” I said, because it was the only thing I could think of to say that wasn’t an apology. An apology would require acknowledging what I’d done and why I’d reacted the way I had, and that door was staying shut.
I pressed the wipe to her knee. She sucked in a breath through her teeth but didn’t pull away. I cleaned the scrape with careful, precise movements, the same focus I used on machinery, every motion deliberate, controlled, designed to do the job without causing more damage.
“Stop smiling,” I said without looking up. I could feel her eyes on me, and I could feel the smile, radiating off her like heat.
“Then you smile for me,” she said.
My hand paused on her knee. “There’s no reason to smile.”
She leaned forward. I could feel the shift in the air between us, the distance shrinking, and then her face was close to mine, close enough that I could see the exact shade of her eyes, lighter at the center, darker at the edges, like the sky reflected in a lake.
“Shouldn’t I be enough reason?” she asked.
The question hung there, suspended between us like smoke. My heart did something it hadn’t done in years. It kicked.
Then she laughed, breaking the moment like a stone through glass, and leaned back. “Your ears are red,” she said, delighted.
I pressed the bandage onto her knee with more force than necessary. She winced but kept grinning.
“Don’t come back here tomorrow,” I said, packing the first aid kit with sharp, efficient movements.
“You’re gonna miss me.”
“I don’t even know you.”
She tilted her head. Those blue eyes sparkled with something that was either mischief or madness, and at this point I wasn’t sure there was a difference.
“Do you want to know me more?” she asked.
The question was light, playful, tossed out like a ball she expected me to catch. But underneath the lightness, underneath the teasing, there was something real. An actual question. An actual offer.
I stood up, first aid kit in hand, and walked away without answering.
Behind me, I heard Josh say something low and Dollie laugh, and then Chloe’s voice, carrying across the yard with the easy confidence of someone who had already decided she’d won: “See you tomorrow, grumpy.”
I didn’t look back.
The rest of the afternoon was shot. I couldn’t focus.
Every time I picked up a tool, my hands remembered the feel of her skin under my fingers, warm and soft, so different from the wood and metal I spent my days touching.
Every time the yard went quiet between cuts, I heard her voice. Shouldn’t I be enough reason?
No. The answer was no. Because reasons to smile were reasons to care, and reasons to care were reasons to lose, and I had lost enough.
I had lost Jimmy on a dirt road in Kandahar, lost myself in the years after, lost the ability to exist in the world like a normal person who could accept cookies from a pretty woman without flinching hard enough to knock her down.
Josh found me in the workshop after closing, sanding a table leg that didn’t need sanding.
“So,” he said, leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed and that look on his face, the one that said he was about to be insufferable. “Chloe.”
“No.”
“I didn’t even say anything yet.”
“You were going to. Don’t.”
“I was just going to say that she seems nice.”
“She seems like a headache.”
Josh grinned. The kind of grin that made me want to throw the sandpaper at him. “She made you blush.”
“She did not.”
“Your ears were the color of a fire truck, Sawyer. I could see it from thirty feet away.”
“Get out of my workshop.”
“She likes you.”
“She doesn’t know me. She likes bothering me. There’s a difference.”
“Is there, though?”
I set down the sandpaper and looked at him. Flat. Direct. The look I used when I needed someone to understand that a conversation was over.
Josh held up his hands. “Okay, okay. I’m going. But for what it’s worth? That’s the most alive I’ve seen you look in three years.”
He left before I could respond, which was probably smart, because I didn’t have a response.
I stood in my workshop, surrounded by sawdust and half-finished furniture and the smell of cedar, and I thought about a woman who stuck her tongue out at me in my own sawmill and kissed my cheek like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Then I picked up the sandpaper and went back to work.
The cookies were still on the flat surface where I’d left them. I found them when I was locking up, the paper bag sitting there in the fading light, slightly crumpled and dusted with sawdust.
I stood there looking at them for a long time.
Then I picked up the bag, took it to my truck, and drove home.
I ate them at my kitchen table, alone, in the silence of a cabin that had never felt quite this empty before. The cookies were good. Brown butter and sea salt, sweet with an edge, exactly like the woman who’d bought them.
I ate every single one.