Chapter 17
CHLOE
Iwoke up to the sound of my daughter’s laughter.
It came from the main room, muffled by the bedroom door but unmistakable.
Emma’s laugh was a specific, identifiable thing, a bright, bubbling sound that started in her belly and rose through her like champagne.
I hadn’t heard it enough in the past two years.
The running, the hiding, the constant watchfulness had turned my daughter into a child who smiled carefully and laughed rarely.
Hearing it now, free and full and ringing through the cabin like a bell, made my throat close.
I lay in bed for a moment, listening. Under Emma’s laughter was the low rumble of a voice. Deep. Quiet. Speaking in a cadence that I knew intimately, the careful, measured way a man talks when he’s not used to talking and is trying very hard to get it right.
I got up, pulled on a sweater, and opened the bedroom door.
They were on the couch.
Sawyer was sitting at one end, his bandaged foot propped on the coffee table, a book open in his lap.
Emma was curled against his side with Sir Chomps-a-Lot squished between them, and she was looking up at him with the rapturous attention of a child being told the best story of her life.
He was reading to her. Not a children’s book, because Sawyer Cole did not own children’s books.
He was reading from one of his woodworking manuals, the thick one about joinery techniques, and he was narrating it like it was an adventure novel.
“And then,” he said, his voice low and serious, “the carpenter realized that the dovetail joint was too tight. One millimeter too wide. If he forced it, the wood would crack. If he didn’t fix it, the entire bookshelf would collapse.”
“What did he do?” Emma whispered, gripping Sir Chomps-a-Lot.
“He got his chisel. The sharp one. The one he only uses for emergencies.”
“Like a sword?”
“Exactly like a sword.”
Emma squealed with delight. Sawyer turned the page with the gravity of a man revealing a plot twist. I stood in the doorway and watched them and felt tears slide down my cheeks before I could stop them.
The guilt was a living thing. It breathed.
It had weight. It sat on my chest and pressed down and whispered all the things I already knew: that he had missed this.
Six years of bedtime stories and morning pancakes and small hands reaching for his.
Six years of first words and first steps and the thousand tiny moments that make up a childhood.
I had taken that from him. I had run, and I had kept running, and every mile between us had been a mile of moments he would never get back.
I wiped my face with the back of my hand, hard and fast, before either of them noticed.
“Good morning, Mama!” Emma said, spotting me. She bounced off the couch and ran to me, wrapping her arms around my waist. “Uncle Sawyer is reading me about dovetails. They’re like puzzles for wood.”
“That sounds fascinating, baby.” I kissed the top of her head and looked over her at Sawyer.
He was watching me. His expression was neutral, guarded, but his eyes held something I couldn’t read.
Something that flickered between warmth and distance, like a fire that couldn’t decide if it wanted to burn or go out.
“Are you enjoying time with Uncle Sawyer?” I asked Emma.
“He’s great,” Emma said firmly. “He knows everything about wood. And he said he’s going to build me a dinosaur. A triceratops, Mama. With real horns.”
“Real horns might be a safety concern.”
“Wooden horns, Mama. Keep up.”
I smiled despite the weight in my chest. Emma detached herself and returned to the couch, resuming her position against Sawyer’s side like it was a spot she’d occupied her entire life.
The ease of it, the way she tucked herself against him without hesitation, without the careful testing she applied to every other new person, made something inside me ache.
She knew. On some level that had nothing to do with facts or explanations, she knew.
I went to the kitchen and started breakfast. Coffee first, because functioning before coffee was a philosophical position I refused to take. Then eggs, toast, the simple routine of a morning that felt anything but simple.
“Sawyer,” I said, carrying his coffee to the couch. “Are you going to shower today?”
He looked at his bandaged foot, then at the crutches leaning against the wall. The logistics of a one-footed man in a shower were not straightforward.
He nodded.
“I’ll help you,” I said. The words came out matter-of-fact, teacher-mode, the voice I used when I was organizing twenty-three children into a fire drill line and could not afford to be anything other than efficient.
“You don’t have to.”
“You can’t stand on one foot in a wet shower. You’ll fall. I’ll fall-proof the situation.”
He looked at me for a beat too long, then nodded again.
After breakfast, I got him to the bathroom.
The space was small, utilitarian, exactly what you’d expect from a man who viewed personal grooming as a necessary inconvenience.
A shower stall, a sink, a mirror, a towel on a hook.
Nothing decorative. Nothing soft. The bathroom of a man who had been living alone for a very long time and had stopped noticing.
I set up the shower stool I’d found in the back of a closet (a remnant from a long-ago injury, I guessed) and tested the water temperature. When I turned back, Sawyer was standing in the doorway, his hands on the hem of his shirt, watching me.
“I can manage from here,” he said.
“I need to make sure you can get in without slipping. Just let me…”
He pulled the shirt over his head.
I turned around so fast I nearly gave myself whiplash.
His chest was right there. Broad, scarred, mapped with muscle and the evidence of a life lived hard.
I’d seen it before. I’d touched it before.
I’d traced those scars with my fingertips in the warm, rain-washed dark of this very cabin.
But that was seven years ago, and we were different people now, and I was not going to stand in his bathroom and stare at him like a woman who hadn’t moved on, even though I hadn’t moved on, which was the whole problem.
“As if you haven’t seen any of this before,” he said from behind me.
“Shut up, Sawyer.”
I heard the low, rough sound that I recognized as a laugh.
Not the full laugh from yesterday on the lawn, but its quieter cousin, the one that came through his chest instead of his throat.
I kept my back turned, my face burning, and stared at the bathroom wall with an intensity usually reserved for solving complex mathematical equations.
“I’m getting in,” he said. “You can look.”
I didn’t look until I heard the water running and the shower curtain pulled.
I helped him adjust the stool, handed him soap and shampoo through the gap in the curtain, and stood guard in case anything went catastrophically wrong.
The steam filled the small room and fogged the mirror, and I tried very hard not to think about the shape of him behind the curtain, the water running over skin I knew the geography of.
“Shampoo,” he said, and his hand came through the curtain, palm up.
I placed it in his hand. Our fingers touched. I pulled back like I’d been burned.
“You’re jumpy,” he observed.
“I’m efficient. There’s a difference. Are you done?”
“Almost.”
I waited in the hallway while he dried off and dressed. When he emerged, damp-haired and smelling like soap and cedar, he looked at me with an expression that was almost, almost, amused.
“Thank you,” he said.
“You’re welcome. Next time you can fall and crack your head open for all I care.”
“There she is,” he said, and the softness in his voice caught me off guard.
I fled to the kitchen.
At lunch, the cabin transformed. Emma had decided that mealtimes were her domain, and she arranged the table with the exacting standards of a tiny restaurant manager, napkins folded into triangles, glasses aligned, silverware straight.
She put a wildflower she’d picked from the yard in a water glass at the center and stood back to admire her work.
“This is the fanciest meal I’ve ever served,” she announced.
I’d made sandwiches. They were not fancy. But Emma’s presentation elevated them to something that felt almost ceremonial, and when we sat down, the three of us at the table, it felt like something more than lunch.
Sawyer told stories.
I don’t know what unlocked it. Maybe it was Emma’s face, the way she looked at him with the complete attention of a child who has decided that someone is worth listening to.
Maybe it was the lunch, the normalcy of it, the strange and terrifying domesticity of sharing sandwiches with a woman he’d loved and lost and a child he didn’t know was his.
Whatever it was, Sawyer talked more at that meal than I’d heard him talk in the entire time I’d known him.
He told Emma about the sawmill. About the time a log rolled off the stack and chased Danny across the yard like a scene from a cartoon.
About the morning Josh accidentally turned on the wrong saw and cut a perfectly good table in half, then tried to glue it back together before Sawyer noticed.
About the delivery driver who was so afraid of Sawyer’s glare that he left the lumber in the wrong yard and didn’t come back for three days.
Emma laughed until she couldn’t breathe.
She had tears streaming down her face, her sandwich forgotten, her whole body shaking with the kind of laughter that is contagious and unstoppable.
She laughed so hard she fell off her chair, which made her laugh harder, and Sawyer looked down at her on the floor and his face did the thing.
The thing where the hard lines softened. Where the jaw unclenched and the eyes warmed and the mouth forgot to be a straight line. He didn’t smile, not fully, but the ghost of it was there, and it was directed at Emma, and it was the most beautiful almost-smile I had ever seen.
“More,” Emma gasped from the floor. “Tell me more.”
And he did. He sat at the table in the cabin he’d built with his own hands, telling stories to a girl he didn’t know was his daughter, and the sound of her laughter filled the spaces that had been empty for seven years.
I watched them and thought: he deserves to know.
He deserves to know, and the longer I wait, the worse it will be, and the guilt I’m carrying is nothing compared to the guilt I’ll carry if I let this go on.
But not today. Today, the cabin was full of laughter and sandwiches and a girl with green eyes who had already decided that Uncle Sawyer was the most interesting person she’d ever met.
Today was enough.
Tomorrow, I would be brave.