Chapter 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.
I pressed my palms to my eyes and breathed.
“What are you doing at my boyfriend’s cabin?”
The voice came from below the porch. Sharp, high, and loaded with the kind of possessive accusation that cuts before you even understand you’ve been hit.
I dropped my hands and looked down.
She was standing at the bottom of the porch steps.
Tall, dark-haired, with the kind of angular beauty that photographs well and a mouth set in a line that said she was not here to make friends.
She was wearing a fitted jacket, expensive boots, and an expression that could have flash-frozen the puddles in the yard.
“Boyfriend?” I repeated. The word tasted wrong.
“Sawyer.” She said his name like she owned it. “He is my boyfriend. Has been for a while now, but I’m guessing he didn’t mention that. They usually don’t.”
The cabin door opened behind me. Sawyer stepped out, pulling a shirt over his head, his hair still sleep-tousled, and the woman’s face lit up like someone had plugged her in. She moved up the steps, fast and certain, and threaded her arm through his like she was completing a circuit.
“Baby,” she said, pressing against his side. “I came by last night but you weren’t answering your phone. I figured you were at the mill.”
Sawyer’s face was doing something complicated. His eyes were on me, not on her, and there was something in them that looked like panic, the kind of panic that comes from two worlds colliding that were never supposed to meet.
“Chloe,” he started.
I held up my hand.
Everything inside me, the warmth, the tenderness, the raw and precious thing that had opened up between us in this cabin last night, it all went cold. Ice cold. The kind of cold that doesn’t hurt yet because the nerve endings haven’t caught up, and when they do, the pain will be unimaginable.
“I have to go,” I said.
“Chloe, wait. This isn’t…”
“I have to go.”
I walked down the steps. Past her. Past him.
Past whatever explanation he was trying to assemble, past whatever truth or lie was forming behind those green eyes that I had been foolish enough to trust. I walked across the wet yard to where my car was still parked from yesterday, my bare feet hitting cold gravel, and I didn’t look back.
“Chloe!” His voice followed me, raw and urgent.
I got in the car. Started the engine. Drove.
The tears didn’t come until I was three blocks away, and when they did, they came like the storm last night, sudden and total and without mercy.
I pulled over on a side street and pressed my forehead to the steering wheel and sobbed so hard my ribs ached.
For my mother. For Sawyer. For the beautiful, stupid, reckless thing I’d let myself feel and the brutal efficiency with which it had been destroyed.
I cried until there was nothing left. Then I wiped my face, blew my nose on a napkin from the glove compartment, and drove home.
At my apartment, I moved on autopilot. I called the school and spoke to Mrs. Brennan.
“I need to resign. Immediately. Family emergency. My mother is… she’s very sick.
” Mrs. Brennan, who had seen everything in thirty years but had never heard my voice sound like this, said she understood and wished me strength.
I packed. Not carefully, not thoughtfully, just the essentials shoved into bags with the mechanical efficiency of someone who has decided that speed is the only thing standing between them and a complete breakdown.
Clothes. Documents. The photo of my parents on the bookshelf.
The paperback novel on my nightstand that I’d never finish.
I didn’t pack the throw pillows. I didn’t pack the string lights. Those belonged to a woman who had time for small joys, and that woman was gone.
My phone buzzed. Sawyer. Again. I declined the call. It buzzed again. Declined. Again. Declined. I turned off the phone and put it in the bottom of my bag.
By noon, the apartment was empty of everything that mattered. I left the key on the counter, closed the door, and loaded the car.
The drive to the hospital took three and a half hours. I made it in three, because the speed limit was a suggestion and the highway was empty and I needed to be somewhere that wasn’t here.
St. Catherine’s was a large gray building with too much glass and not enough warmth. The oncology wing was on the fourth floor, and the elevator smelled like antiseptic and the particular brand of artificial calm that hospitals pump through their ventilation systems. Room 412. The door was open.
My mother was in the bed.
She looked smaller. That was the first thing I noticed, the terrible, gutting wrongness of it.
Helen Matthews, who had filled every room she’d ever walked into with her voice and her laughter and her absolute certainty that life was worth celebrating, looked small in that bed.
The hospital gown hung loose on her shoulders.
Her skin had a grayish cast that the fluorescent lights made worse.
But her eyes, when they found me in the doorway, were the same.
Warm and brown and full of a love so fierce it could have powered cities.
“There’s my girl,” she said, and smiled.
I made it three steps before my legs gave out.
My dad caught me. He was there, solid and steady, his arms coming around me the way they had when I was small and the world was too big and too loud, and I buried my face in his chest and cried everything out.
For Mom. For the future that had just been rewritten in language I wasn’t ready to read.
For the man in the cabin and the life I’d been building and the way it had all shattered in the space of a single morning.
“I’m here,” I said, pulling back, wiping my face, finding my voice. “I’m here and I’m not leaving.”
My mother reached for my hand. I took it. Her fingers were thinner than I remembered, but her grip was strong.
“Don’t you dare look at me like that, Chloe Rose Matthews,” she said, and there it was, the fire. Dimmed but not extinguished. “This is a fight, not a funeral. We don’t do funerals in this family until we’ve exhausted every other option.”
I laughed. It came out wet and broken and not very convincing, but it was a laugh, and my mother squeezed my hand and smiled at me, and I decided right then that Sawyer Cole was a chapter that was over.
A mistake I would learn from. A beautiful, painful, irreversible mistake that I would fold up and put away in the part of my heart where things that hurt too much to keep out in the open go to live in the dark.
I squeezed her hand back and said, “Tell me everything.”
And I stayed.