Chapter 8
CHLOE
Iwoke up and the ceiling was spinning.
Not the gentle, pleasant rotation that happens when you’ve had one glass of wine too many on a Friday night.
This was the aggressive, full-commitment kind of spinning, the kind that made my stomach lurch and my brain feel like it had been stuffed with wet cotton.
I pressed my palms against the mattress and tried to sit up.
The room tilted sideways and I grabbed the headboard.
“Okay,” I whispered to no one. “This is not great.”
My throat felt like I’d swallowed sandpaper. My skin was simultaneously freezing and burning, alternating between shivers and waves of heat that made the sheets feel unbearable. When I pressed the back of my hand to my forehead, the heat radiating off it was enough to make me wince.
Fever. A real, genuine, no-question-about-it fever.
I checked the time. Six-fifteen in the morning.
School started at eight. I had twenty-three five-year-olds who needed me, a lesson plan on weather patterns that involved cotton ball clouds and a very ambitious art project, and a field trip permission slip situation with Marcus’s mother that required the kind of diplomatic language normally reserved for international summits.
I tried to stand. My legs had other opinions. The floor rushed up at me and I caught myself on the nightstand, sending the water glass clattering.
“Okay, Chloe,” I said to myself, sitting back on the bed. “New plan.”
I called the school first. Mrs. Brennan answered with the crisp efficiency of a woman who had been running an elementary school for thirty years and had seen everything. I told her I was sick, she told me to rest, and within five minutes a substitute was confirmed. One problem solved.
The next problem was medicine. I opened the bathroom cabinet and stared at the barren shelves. Half a bottle of shampoo. A tube of toothpaste. Band-Aids. No ibuprofen. No cold medicine. No cough drops. Nothing useful for anything more serious than a paper cut.
I’d used the last of the ibuprofen weeks ago, the day after lugging Marcus’s science project (a papier-mache volcano that weighed roughly as much as an actual volcano) from the parking lot to the classroom. I’d been meaning to restock. I had not restocked.
My phone was on the nightstand. I picked it up and scrolled to Sawyer’s name before I’d fully processed the decision.
He answered on the second ring. “What do you want?”
Two weeks of phone calls between us and he still answered like that. No hello, no hey, no greeting of any kind. Just the blunt, gruff demand that had somehow become the sound I most wanted to hear.
“Are you busy?” My voice came out thin and scratchy, which annoyed me.
“Yes. Lots of things to do. The Henderson delivery got pushed up and the secondary saw is throwing alignment again.”
In the background, I could hear the mill.
Machinery humming, metal on metal, the distant shout of someone calling out a measurement.
Then Sawyer’s voice, slightly muffled like he’d pulled the phone away from his mouth: “Danny, if you stack those boards like that again, I will personally reload this entire truck myself and dock your pay for the time it takes.”
A pause. Then Danny’s voice, faint and chastened: “Yes, sir.”
Sawyer came back on the line. “What is it?”
He was in a mood. The kind of sharp, coiled tension that I’d learned meant something at the mill had gone wrong before 7 AM and every interaction after that was going to get the collateral.
I knew this Sawyer. He wouldn’t be mean to me, not exactly, but he’d be short and clipped and the gentleness that had started creeping into his voice during our late-night phone calls would be locked behind the armor he wore at work.
“Nothing,” I said. “Focus on work. Bye.”
I hung up before he could respond.
Then I sat on the edge of my bed and assessed the situation.
I was sick. I had no medicine. The nearest pharmacy was a twenty-minute drive that I was in absolutely no condition to make.
I could call Dollie, but Dollie was at school covering her own classes plus probably helping wrangle my substitute through the cotton-ball-cloud lesson plan.
I could wait it out, but waiting it out meant lying in bed all day getting worse, and I needed to be functional by tomorrow.
I stood up. Slowly this time, bracing myself on the wall.
The dizziness rushed in, but I gritted my teeth and let it pass.
I got dressed in stages, each movement requiring a rest break.
Sweatpants. Oversized hoodie. The sneakers by the door that I didn’t bother to lace.
I looked like a woman who had given up on several key aspects of life simultaneously, but I was upright, and that counted.
The walk to the pharmacy was brutal. Pinewood Ridge was a small town, but small is relative when your legs feel like cooked noodles and the sidewalk keeps tilting.
I made it to the pharmacy, bought ibuprofen, cold medicine, and a box of tissues, and started the walk home with the paper bag clutched to my chest like a shield.
I was half a block from my apartment when the ground decided to move.
It didn’t, of course. Objectively, the sidewalk was right where it had always been. But my brain and my body had a disagreement about vertical, and my left knee buckled, and for one horrible, weightless second I was going down.
A hand caught my elbow.
“Whoa, hey. Chloe?”
Ryan Marsh. Of course. Because the universe had decided that every embarrassing moment in my life needed a witness, and Ryan was apparently on the rotation.
He steadied me with both hands on my arms, his face creased with concern. “What happened? Are you okay?”
“Fine,” I said automatically. “Just dizzy. Nothing serious.”
“You don’t look fine. You look…” He paused, clearly searching for a word that wouldn’t be offensive. “Unwell.”
“Thank you, Ryan. Very diplomatic.”
“Do you need a ride home? My car’s right over there.”
“I’m literally half a block from my door, but thank you. Really. I appreciate the catch.”
“Anytime. Seriously, Chloe, if you need any…”
“What happened here?”
Sawyer’s voice cut through the conversation like a saw through pine.
I turned, too fast, and the dizziness surged.
He was standing on the sidewalk behind us, his truck parked at the curb with the engine still running and the driver’s door open, like he’d gotten out in a hurry and hadn’t bothered to close it.
He was still in his work clothes, sawdust on his boots, his flannel sleeves rolled to his elbows.
His jaw was set and his eyes were moving between me and Ryan with an intensity that made the air temperature drop.
“Why are you here?” I asked, confused.
He ignored the question. His focus had narrowed to Ryan’s hands, which were still on my arms.
“Just caught her from falling,” Ryan said quickly, reading the situation with the survival instincts of a man who had apparently met Sawyer before. “She looks like she’s running a fever.”
Sawyer stepped forward. His hand closed around mine, warm and certain and large enough to envelop my entire fist. He looked at Ryan with an expression that was technically polite in the same way that a wolf showing its teeth was technically smiling.
“I’ll take care of her,” he said. “You can leave now.”
Ryan’s hands dropped from my arms. He took a step back, gave me a look that said please don’t die and good luck with whatever this is, and walked away.
“You don’t need to be rude,” I said, watching Ryan’s retreating back. “He was being nice.”
Sawyer didn’t respond to that. His hand went to my forehead, his palm flat against my skin, and I watched his expression shift from guarded to something that looked alarmingly close to furious.
“You are burning up,” he said, his voice low and tight. “And you’re outside. Walking. Are you out of your mind?”
“I needed medicine. I ran out.”
“You should have told me.”
“I didn’t want to disturb you. You sounded busy. And honestly, you seemed like you were in a mood.”
His jaw clenched. “I’m always in a mood. That doesn’t mean you don’t call me when you’re sick.”
“I did call you.”
“You called me and then hung up before I could do anything about it. That doesn’t count.”
He pulled me toward the building, his arm coming around my waist to steady me, and I let him because the alternative was face-planting on my own doorstep.
We made it inside, up the stairs, and into my apartment, where he deposited me on the couch with a carefulness that contradicted everything about the hard set of his face.
“Where’s the medicine?” he asked.
I held up the pharmacy bag. He took it, read the labels with the same focus he applied to equipment manuals, and poured two ibuprofen into his palm. Then he filled a glass of water and brought both to me.
“You should have just told me straight,” he said, standing over me with his arms crossed. “So I’d know right away.”
“I’m not your responsibility, Sawyer.”
The words came out reflexive, automatic, the same independence speech I’d been giving since I moved to Pinewood Ridge. I was the woman who fixed her own faucets and paid her own rent and ate cold pasta over the sink. I didn’t need someone to take care of me. That was the whole point.
He looked at me for a long moment. His green eyes, usually so carefully guarded, were open in a way that made my breath catch. Then he said, in a voice that was rough and quiet and utterly sure of itself:
“You bugged me for over a month. You showed up at my sawmill with cookies and opinions. You held me through a nightmare and cooked me pancakes and called me grumpy so many times I forgot what my actual name sounded like.” He paused. “You earned my responsibility.”
The room went very still.
The fever was making my eyes watery. That was definitely it.
The fever and the medicine and the general state of being sick.
It had nothing to do with the fact that Sawyer Cole, the most closed-off, walled-up, emotionally fortified man I had ever met, had just told me I mattered to him in the only language he knew how to speak.
“Should I blush at that?” I asked, and my voice cracked on the last word.
“Just take the medicine,” he said, but the hardness in his face had softened, and when he sat down on the couch next to me, he pulled the blanket off the back and draped it over my legs with a gentleness that made me want to cry all over again.
He stayed.
The entire day. He called Josh and told him to handle the mill.
He made soup from the ingredients in my fridge (which wasn’t as good as my soup, but I didn’t tell him that).
He refilled my water. He put his hand on my forehead every hour like a human thermometer and reported the results with clinical seriousness.
(“Still hot.” “Less hot.” “Better. Drink more water.”)
At one point, I woke from a nap to find him sitting in the armchair by the window, reading one of my paperback romance novels.
He was holding it like it might bite him, his brow furrowed in concentration, and when he noticed me watching, he set it down with the casual speed of a man pretending he hadn’t been reading at all.
“Any good?” I asked.
“It’s ridiculous.”
“You were on page forty-seven.”
“I was looking at it. Not reading it.”
“Sawyer, your thumb was marking a page.”
He stood up and went to refill my water glass, and I was pretty sure the tips of his ears were red.
By evening, the fever had broken. I was still weak, still tired, but the dizziness had faded and the world had stopped its aggressive spinning.
Sawyer was in the kitchen, washing the soup pot with the methodical thoroughness of a man who cleaned things the way he built things, properly and completely.
“Thank you,” I said from the couch.
He didn’t turn around. “Don’t get sick again.”
“That’s not really how illness works.”
“Then take better care of yourself.”
“I was taking care of myself. I walked to the pharmacy.”
“You almost collapsed on the sidewalk.”
“I had it under control.”
He turned around, the dish towel over his shoulder, and looked at me with an expression that said he had very strong opinions about my definition of “under control.” But he didn’t argue. He just hung the towel on the oven handle, walked to the couch, and sat down beside me.
“Next time,” he said, not looking at me, his eyes fixed on some point across the room. “Just call. I’ll come.”
I leaned my head against his shoulder. He didn’t pull away.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll call.”
We sat like that until I fell asleep, his shoulder solid under my cheek, his breathing steady as a metronome, and somewhere in the space between waking and sleep, I felt his hand find mine under the blanket and hold on.