Chapter 16
SAWYER
Dollie’s car smelled like vanilla and bad decisions.
She was driving because I couldn’t, on account of the hole in my foot, and Chloe was in the passenger seat staring out the window like the passing trees held the answers to every question she’d ever asked.
Emma was behind me, buckled into a booster seat that Dollie had produced from somewhere with the terrifying efficiency of a woman who kept child safety equipment on standby.
The stuffed dinosaur, Sir Chomps-a-Lot, occupied the seat next to Emma like a plush bodyguard.
“You know,” Dollie said, adjusting the rearview mirror so she could see all of us at once, “it’s kind of poetic when you think about it.
Fate just keeps throwing you two back together.
Like the universe has a plan and you both keep trying to mess it up, and the universe keeps going, ‘Nope, try again.’”
“Shut it, Dollie,” Chloe said, still looking out the window.
“I’m just saying. Seven years. Seven whole years. And here we are, all in a car together, driving to your cabin.” She glanced at me in the mirror. “Fate is undefeated.”
I said nothing because engaging with Dollie on the subject of fate was a losing proposition, and also because I was using every available ounce of concentration to not look at the back of Chloe’s head and think about the conversation at the hospital.
The things she’d told me. The things I hadn’t been able to unhear since.
Emma was studying us.
I could feel it. The particular weight of a child’s attention, direct and unfiltered and missing none of the things that adults think they’re hiding.
Her eyes moved from the back of Chloe’s seat to Dollie to me and back again, processing the currents in the car with the quiet intelligence that seemed to define her.
“What does Auntie Dee mean, Mama?” Emma asked. “About fate bringing you back?”
Chloe turned slightly, her mouth opening with the beginnings of an explanation that I could tell was going to be carefully worded, age-appropriate, and completely devoid of useful information. Before she could get a syllable out, Dollie beat her to it.
“Your mama once liked Sawyer,” Dollie said, bright and cheerful and utterly merciless. “A long time ago. She used to bring him cookies at the sawmill and follow him around and call him grumpy. It was very cute.”
“Dollie!” Chloe’s voice hit a register that could have shattered the windshield.
Emma’s eyes swung to me. She looked at me for a long moment, her head tilted, her gaze traveling over my face with the frank assessment of someone who had not yet learned that staring was impolite.
Those green eyes, sharp and serious, examined me with a thoroughness that made my chest do something uncomfortable.
“No doubt,” she said finally, nodding with the gravity of a six-year-old who had reached an important conclusion. “He is handsome. Mama has good eyes.”
Chloe made a sound like a deflating balloon.
Her hand came up to cover Emma’s mouth, but Emma had already delivered the verdict, and her little face was satisfied behind her mother’s palm.
Chloe’s cheeks had turned a shade of pink that I hadn’t seen in seven years, the same shade that used to appear when I caught her staring at me in the sawmill.
Something shifted inside me. Not the sharp, grinding shift of pain or loss, but something lighter.
Something that felt, terrifyingly, like warmth.
I looked at this kid, this small human with her braids and her dinosaur and her absolute certainty that her mother’s taste in men was sound, and I felt something I couldn’t name.
A pull. A warmth. The strange, unexpected feeling of being tethered to someone you’ve just met, as if something deeper than logic was at work.
“Mama’s face is red,” Emma observed helpfully.
“Thank you, Emma,” Chloe said through gritted teeth. “I noticed.”
Dollie was grinning so hard I thought her face might split. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep the corners of my mouth from doing something unprecedented.
“Uncle Sawyer,” Emma said, trying the name out with the experimental boldness of a child adopting a new character, “do you still like cookies?”
“I eat them occasionally.”
“Mama can make you some. She makes really good ones. With chocolate chips and everything.”
“Emma, please stop helping,” Chloe whispered.
“I’m just being friendly, Mama. You said I should always be friendly.”
The cabin appeared through the trees, and the car went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with Emma’s commentary.
I watched Chloe’s face in the side mirror.
The color drained from her cheeks, replacing the pink with something paler, and her eyes went distant, traveling back to a night seven years ago when she’d sat at my kitchen table in my flannel shirt and listened to me talk about my brother.
We pulled up. Dollie parked and was out of the car before anyone else, unloading bags from the trunk with the focused energy of a woman on a mission. Emma unbuckled herself with practiced efficiency and hopped out, Sir Chomps-a-Lot in tow, and stood in the yard looking at the cabin with wide eyes.
“This is your house?” she asked me.
“This is my house.”
“It looks like a house in a storybook. Does it have a fireplace?”
“It does.”
“Does it have a yard?”
“The whole forest is the yard.”
Her face lit up like I’d told her Christmas had been moved to tomorrow. She turned to Chloe, who was getting out of the car slowly, her eyes still on the cabin. “Mama, did you hear that? The whole forest is the yard.”
I got the crutches from the backseat and made my way to the porch.
Chloe was standing at the bottom of the steps, looking up at the door, and I could see the memories moving behind her eyes.
The rain. The kitchen. The picture of Jimmy.
Everything that had happened in this cabin, the best night and the worst morning, all of it contained in these four walls.
I stopped beside her. Close enough that my arm brushed hers.
“Are you remembering something?” I asked, low enough that only she could hear.
She turned to look at me, and whatever was in her expression, the mix of grief and memory and something softer that she was trying to hold back, flashed hot. She planted both hands on my chest and shoved.
The crutches went out from under me and I went down, landing on my back on the grass with a thud that knocked the air out of my lungs and sent a bolt of pain through my injured foot.
“Mama, be careful!” Emma shrieked, running over. “He’s hurt!”
Chloe stood over me, her cheeks flushed, her jaw set, looking exactly like the woman who had once called me a bitter grumpy man in my own sawmill. Then the anger cracked, and underneath it was something that looked suspiciously like the urge to laugh, and she bent down and grabbed my arm.
“Get up,” she said, pulling me to sitting with a strength that belied her size. She retrieved the crutches and shoved them at me. “Don’t whisper things in my ear.”
“I asked a question.”
“It was a loaded question and you know it.”
I looked up at her from the ground, grass in my hair, my foot throbbing, and something happened that hadn’t happened in seven years.
I laughed.
Not a small, bitten-off sound. Not the ghost of amusement I’d allowed myself in rare moments.
A real laugh, full and rough and startled out of me by the sheer absurdity of being knocked down by a woman half my size who was angry at me for asking if she had memories.
It burst out of me like something that had been locked in a room and finally kicked the door open.
Chloe stared at me. Her mouth opened. Her eyes went wide.
“Did you just… laugh?” she said.
Emma clapped. “He did! He laughed! Mama, you made him laugh!”
Dollie, who had paused in the doorway with a suitcase in each hand, looked at the scene on the lawn with the expression of a woman who was mentally composing a text to Josh that would be forty-seven paragraphs long.
“I have never heard you laugh,” Chloe said, and her voice had gone soft in a way that was dangerous. Dangerous to me. Dangerous to the walls I was supposed to be keeping up.
“Don’t get used to it,” I said, getting to my feet with the crutches and significantly less dignity than I’d started the day with.
She helped me up the steps. Her hand on my arm was firm and businesslike, and she did not look at me while she did it, which told me she was feeling everything and showing nothing. I knew the strategy. I’d invented it.
Inside the cabin, Emma gasped. She ran to the bookshelf, to the window, to the woodstove.
She touched everything with her fingertips, light and reverent, like the cabin was a museum of wonders.
When she found the workshop in the back, with the half-finished furniture and the tools hanging on their pegs, she turned to me with an expression of pure awe.
“You build things?” she asked.
“I do.”
“Can you build me a dinosaur?”
“I can try.”
The smile she gave me was so bright it physically hurt. Not in the way pain usually hurt. In a different way. In the way that a door opening after years of being closed hurts, the rush of air and light into a space that had forgotten what those things felt like.
Dollie left within the hour, hugging Chloe tight and whispering something in her ear that made Chloe nod and blink fast. She hugged Emma, told her to take care of “these two disasters,” and turned to me at the door.
“Take care of them,” she said.
“They’re supposed to be taking care of me,” I said, gesturing at the crutches. “That’s the arrangement.”
Dollie gave me a look that communicated approximately seventeen different things, all of them some variation of “you know exactly what I mean, Sawyer Cole, don’t you dare play dumb with me.” Then she got in her car and drove away, and it was just the three of us.
Chloe cooked dinner. She moved around my kitchen with the same easy competence she’d had seven years ago, finding things in cabinets I’d barely opened, humming under her breath while the pasta water boiled.
The cabin filled with the smell of garlic and tomatoes, the same smell from that night, the first night she’d cooked for me, and the memory was so sharp it felt like touching a blade.
Emma set the table. She found three plates, three forks, three glasses, and arranged them with geometric precision. Then she sat in the chair nearest mine and looked up at me.
“Thank you for saving me,” she said. Quiet. Serious. The playfulness from the car ride was gone, replaced by something older. “The bad man was scary. But you were scarier.”
“I wasn’t scary,” I said.
“You were to him.” She looked at her hands on the table, small and precise. “Nobody ever fought for me before. Except Mama. But she’s small.”
The words landed in a place inside me that I didn’t know still had feeling.
I looked at this girl, this fierce, careful, extraordinary girl who lined up her shoes and named her dinosaur and had my eyes and her mother’s courage, and the thing I’d been feeling since the parking lot, the pull, the recognition, the tethering, tightened into something that felt permanent.
“Well,” I said, “now someone has.”
Emma smiled. And Chloe, standing at the stove with her back to us, went very still.
We ate dinner together. The three of us, at a table built for two, in a cabin that had been built for one. And for the first time in seven years, the silence in the room wasn’t empty.
It was full.