Chapter 3
CHLOE
“Absolutely not.”
“Absolutely yes.”
“Dollie, I have paint in my hair, I smell like hand sanitizer and apple juice, and I’m wearing a shirt that a six-year-old wiped his nose on. I am not going anywhere.”
Dollie McKinnon looked at me from across the teachers’ lounge table with the serene, immovable expression of a woman who had already decided how this conversation was going to end.
She was five-foot-two, had red hair that she claimed was natural but definitely wasn’t, and possessed the kind of stubborn charm that made it nearly impossible to say no to her about anything.
We’d been teaching at Pinewood Ridge Elementary together for two years, and in that time I’d learned that arguing with Dollie was like arguing with the weather.
You could complain all you wanted, but it was still going to rain.
“I made cookies,” she said, tapping the tin on the table between us.
It was decorated with little hand-painted sunflowers, because of course it was.
“Chocolate chip. Josh’s favorite. I want to bring them to him at the sawmill, but I’ve never been there before, and I am not walking into a place full of large men with sharp tools by myself. ”
“You’re dating one of those large men with sharp tools.”
“Which is exactly why I need moral support. What if I say something embarrassing? What if I trip on a log? What if there’s sawdust in my hair and I look like a before photo?”
“You want me to be your emotional support friend at a sawmill.”
“Yes. That is exactly what I want. Thank you for understanding.”
I groaned and let my head fall onto the table.
The Formica was cool against my forehead, which was nice, because the day had been approximately nine hundred degrees of chaos.
Marcus had outdone himself by stuffing an entire crayon up his nose during art time, requiring a level of calm, steady extraction that I felt should qualify me for some kind of medical credential.
Two of the girls had gotten into an argument about whether unicorns were real that had escalated to tears, shouting, and one dramatically thrown glitter pen.
And the fire drill had gone off during story time, which meant I’d had to wrangle twenty-three small humans across a parking lot while half of them cried and the other half treated it like a field trip.
“I’ll buy you coffee after,” Dollie said.
I lifted my head. “Large?”
“The largest they make.”
“With whipped cream?”
“I’ll ask for extra.”
I sighed. “Fine. But we’re not staying long. I need to go home and become a person again.”
Dollie beamed and clutched the cookie tin to her chest like she’d won a prize. “You’re the best friend a girl could ask for.”
“I know. Remember that when I ask you to cover my recess duty next week.”
Twenty minutes later, we were pulling up to the Pinewood Ridge Sawmill, and I was starting to regret my decision.
The sawmill sat on the east edge of town where the road curved toward the mountains and the trees grew thick enough to block out the afternoon sky.
It was bigger than I’d expected, a sprawling compound of weathered buildings, stacked lumber, and heavy machinery that hummed with a low, persistent vibration I could feel through the soles of my shoes.
The air smelled like fresh-cut pine and diesel, and there was a fine layer of sawdust coating everything, the ground, the fences, the trucks parked along the perimeter, like the whole place existed inside a snow globe filled with wood shavings.
“It’s so… rustic,” Dollie said from the passenger seat, clutching her sunflower tin.
“It’s a sawmill, Dollie. What were you expecting? A spa?”
“I was expecting it to be smaller. Josh made it sound like a little operation. This is like a whole compound. There are vehicles. And machinery. And men.”
“Yes. Men tend to be present at places of employment.”
“Large men.”
“Dollie.”
“I’m going.” She took a breath, checked her reflection in the visor mirror, and got out of the car. I followed.
We walked through the open gate and into the main yard, where the noise level tripled.
Saws buzzed. Machines clanked and groaned.
Somewhere to our left, a truck was being loaded with lumber, the logs swinging from a crane with the kind of casual danger that made my kindergarten-safety-trained brain go into overdrive.
I spotted Josh before Dollie did. He was near the main building, stacking boards onto a pallet with another guy, his sleeves rolled up and his arms dusty with sawdust. When he saw Dollie, his entire face changed.
It went from focused and working to soft and stupid in about half a second, the kind of expression that belonged on a greeting card.
“Babe!” He dropped what he was doing and jogged over, a grin splitting his face. “What are you doing here?”
Dollie held up the tin. “I made you cookies.”
“You made me…” He took the tin, opened it, and his eyes went wide. “Chocolate chip?”
“Your favorite.”
He looked at her like she’d handed him a winning lottery ticket. Then he pulled her into a hug that lifted her off the ground, cookie tin and all, and kissed her on the forehead. She laughed, this bright, bubbling sound that made everyone within earshot look over.
I stood there, holding my purse strap, watching them be adorable and feeling like the world’s most dedicated third wheel.
This was my life. Accompanying my best friend to her boyfriend’s workplace so she could deliver baked goods while I stood in sawdust and tried to look like I had a reason to exist.
“Chloe, thank you for coming with her,” Josh said, setting Dollie down but keeping his arm around her. “She’s been talking about bringing cookies all week. I think she was nervous.”
“I was not nervous,” Dollie said, which was a blatant lie.
“She made me drive,” I said. “Because, and I quote, ‘what if I get so nervous I drive into a log pile.’”
Josh laughed. Dollie elbowed me. I grinned.
That’s when I heard it.
“Josh.”
The voice came from behind us, deep and flat, with the kind of authority that didn’t need volume to command attention. It was the verbal equivalent of a door closing, and it made all three of us turn.
He was standing about twenty feet away, near the entrance to the main mill building, and the first thing I registered was that he was big.
Not just tall, though he was that too, but solid, built in a way that suggested his body was a tool he used daily and maintained through labor, not a gym.
His shoulders were broad, his arms thick beneath a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, exposing forearms roped with muscle and dusted with sawdust. His dark hair was pushed back from his forehead, and his jaw was set in a line so hard you could have used it as a straightedge.
His eyes landed on Josh. They were green. Dark, deep green, like pine needles after rain.
I knew those eyes.
The recognition hit me like a truck. The sidewalk. The cold night. The man who’d been crying for his brother, whose face I’d held in my hands while he shattered. The man who’d sat at my kitchen table, eating soup and glaring at me like I’d committed a personal offense by existing.
My grumpy stranger.
He hadn’t seen me yet. His focus was locked on Josh, and his expression said he was not pleased.
“It’s still five minutes before your break,” he said, his voice carrying across the yard like it was built for open spaces. “Go back to work.”
Josh’s arm tightened around Dollie, but I could see him deflate a little. “Come on, Sawyer, she just got here. Five minutes.”
Sawyer. His name was Sawyer. I filed that away, a small piece of the puzzle clicking into place.
“Five minutes before your break means you are still on the clock,” Sawyer said. His tone didn’t change. It didn’t need to. It was the kind of tone that was already at its final volume. “Rules don’t adjust because your girlfriend brought snacks.”
Then his eyes shifted.
They moved from Josh to Dollie to me, and I watched the recognition land.
It was subtle, barely a flicker. His jaw tightened by a fraction.
His shoulders pulled back. But his expression stayed locked down, giving away nothing except a slight narrowing of his eyes that told me he remembered exactly who I was.
“And don’t bring visitors while people are working,” he said, his gaze still on me. “This is a sawmill, not a social club.”
Oh, absolutely not.
Something hot and stubborn flared in my chest. I didn’t know much about this man, but I knew he’d been crying on a sidewalk, and I knew I’d dragged him into my home and fed him soup, and I knew that the last words he’d said to me had been a grudging “thank you” that I’d practically had to pry out of him with a crowbar.
And now he was standing here, in his little kingdom of sawdust and machinery, acting like we were trespassing on sacred ground because Dollie wanted to give her boyfriend cookies.
“A bitter grumpy man,” I said.
The words came out before I could stop them. Clear, bright, and ringing across the yard like a bell. Dollie’s hand flew to my arm, her fingers digging in, and I could feel her entire body tense beside me.
Sawyer’s eyes locked onto mine. “What did you just say?”
The smart thing to do would have been to backtrack. Laugh it off. Say “nothing” and let Dollie drag me away. The smart thing and the Chloe thing, unfortunately, were rarely the same thing.
“I said, you are a bitter grumpy man.” I crossed my arms. “She brought him cookies. Cookies, not a marching band. He’s going back to work in five minutes anyway. Would it kill you to just let people be nice to each other without acting like it’s a personal attack on your operation?”
The yard had gone quiet. Or maybe it hadn’t, maybe the saws were still running and the machines were still humming, but in the space between me and this man, the air had stilled. Josh looked like he was trying to melt into the ground. Dollie’s grip on my arm had reached tourniquet pressure.
Sawyer stared at me. I stared back.