Chapter 9
SAWYER
She was sitting at my workbench again.
Not the office chair. Not the lumber stack where normal visitors would wait.
My workbench. The one in the back of the mill where I did detail work, the surface scarred with years of blade marks and stained with wood oil.
She had her legs crossed under her, a stack of kindergarten evaluations on her lap, a red pen in her hand, and a look of concentration on her face that made it clear she’d completely forgotten she was in a sawmill and not a living room.
I watched her for a moment before she noticed me.
The way her lips moved when she read. The way she tapped the pen against her chin when she was thinking.
The way she’d circled a word on one of the papers and written something in the margin with a careful, looping hand that probably made her students feel like every correction was a compliment.
She’d been doing this for weeks now. Showing up at the mill after school, parking herself somewhere in my workspace, grading papers or reading or just talking at me while I worked.
She brought cookies sometimes. Coffee other times.
Once she’d brought a Bluetooth speaker and played what she called “sawmill ambiance music,” which turned out to be bluegrass, and I’d let it play for twenty minutes before I realized I was tapping my foot and shut it off.
She looked up. The concentration broke into a smile so immediate and warm that my chest did the thing it always did. The involuntary tightening. The Pavlovian response to Chloe Matthews’s face that I had stopped pretending I could control.
“Hey, grumpy,” she said. “I’m almost done with Marcus’s evaluation. He spelled his name with a backwards S and I need to figure out how to phrase ‘creative interpretation of the alphabet’ without his mother calling me.”
“My workbench is not a desk.”
“It’s a flat surface. All flat surfaces are potential desks. That’s basic physics.”
“That’s not physics.”
“Then it’s basic Chloe logic, which is equally valid.”
The sky had been darkening all afternoon, clouds piling up over the mountains in thick, bruised layers that promised nothing good.
I’d been watching them between tasks, calculating how much time we had before the rain hit.
Mountain storms didn’t negotiate. They arrived without warning and left without apology, and this one looked like it had a personal grudge against anyone stupid enough to be outdoors.
“You should head out,” I said, checking the sky through the mill’s open bay doors. “Storm’s coming.”
“Five more minutes. I just need to finish this page.”
“Chloe.”
“Three minutes.”
“Now.”
She looked up at me with those blue eyes, and I saw the exact moment she decided to ignore my tone and smile at me instead. “You know, the growly voice doesn’t work on me anymore. It just makes you sound like a bear who hasn’t had his coffee.”
The rain hit before I could respond.
Not a gradual build. Not a warning sprinkle followed by the main event.
One second the air was dry, the next, a wall of water came down so hard and so fast that the sound on the metal roof was like a thousand drummers hitting at once.
The bay doors let in a sheet of sideways rain that soaked the first three feet of floor within seconds.
Chloe yelped. Her papers went flying as she scrambled off the workbench, clutching the stack to her chest while the wind grabbed the loose ones and sent them scattering across the mill floor like oversized confetti.
I moved. Hit the switch for the bay doors, pulling them down against the storm, and grabbed the umbrella from the hook by the office door. By the time I got back to her, she was crouched on the floor, gathering soggy papers with an expression that was half dismay, half laughter.
“My evaluations,” she said, holding up a sheet that was already bleeding red ink. “Marcus’s mom is definitely going to have to wait.”
I opened the umbrella and held it over her, even though we were inside and the gesture was pointless. The habit was there. The instinct to put something between her and whatever was trying to get at her. Rain, cold, sadness, anything.
“You should not have come here today,” I said. “You’re going to be sick again.”
She looked up at me from the floor, her hair already damp from the mist that had blown in before I’d gotten the doors down. “Then you’ll take care of me again.”
“Not funny.”
“Who’s being funny? You made really good soup last time.”
“I don’t want you sick, Chloe.”
She stood up, the soggy papers pressed against her chest, and looked at me with an expression that shifted from playful to something softer. Something that made her blue eyes go quiet and searching. “You’re worried about me?”
“Obviously.”
The word came out before I could dress it up or sand it down.
Just that. Obviously. Like it was the most self-evident thing in the world that Sawyer Cole, who had spent years perfecting the art of not caring about anything or anyone, was worried about a kindergarten teacher who couldn’t stay out of the rain.
She smiled. Not the big sunshine smile. The small one. The one that was just for me.
“Come on,” I said. “My cabin’s fifty yards from here. We can wait it out.”
“Better than swimming to the parking lot.”
I held the umbrella over both of us as we stepped outside, and it was useless within three seconds.
The wind tore at it from every direction, the rain coming down sideways, and by the time we made it to the cabin porch we were both drenched.
Chloe was laughing, the kind of breathless, helpless laughter that came from being soaked to the bone and finding it funny, and her hair was plastered to her face in dark, wet ribbons.
I unlocked the door and we stumbled inside.
The cabin was exactly what it had always been.
Small, spare, and functional. A single open room with a bed in one corner, a kitchen along the back wall, a woodstove in the center, and my workshop taking up the entire far side.
The furniture was mine, every piece built by hand during the sleepless nights that had accumulated over the years.
A bookshelf. A table. Two chairs. The bed frame with its simple, clean lines, built from cedar I’d harvested myself.
There were no string lights. No throw pillows. No paper lanterns or cat socks. There was wood and stone and silence, and it had been enough for me.
“I’ll get towels,” I said. “Don’t move. You’re dripping everywhere.”
“Your cabin smells like you,” she called after me as I headed for the bathroom. “Cedar and coffee.”
I grabbed two towels from the shelf and a set of dry clothes for her (a flannel shirt that would hang past her thighs and sweatpants she’d have to cinch to keep up). When I came back into the main room, she wasn’t standing where I’d left her.
She was by the bookshelf. Her hand was raised, her fingers not quite touching a picture frame that sat on the second shelf.
She was looking at Jimmy.
My feet stopped. My lungs stopped. Everything stopped for a beat that lasted longer than it should have, because that photograph was the only personal item in the cabin.
Everything else was functional, necessary, stripped of sentiment.
But this I’d kept. A snapshot from before deployment, taken at a barbecue at our parents’ house.
Jimmy with his arm around my shoulders, both of us sunburned and grinning, his face tipped toward mine like he was about to say something funny.
He was twenty-four in that photo. Alive and bright and so full of the kind of careless joy that I’d never been able to match.
She turned to me. Her face was wet from the rain, her eyes soft and careful, and she didn’t ask the question that was clearly forming behind them. She waited.
“I’ll tell you about him later,” I said. My voice came out rougher than I intended. “Go shower. Before you catch something.”
She nodded. She didn’t push. She didn’t ask. She took the towels and the clothes and went.
I stood in the main room and listened to the rain on the roof and the distant sound of water running in the bathroom and tried not to think about the way she’d looked at that photograph.
Like she already understood that whatever she was seeing was the key to the locked room inside me.
Like she was willing to wait at the door for as long as it took.
When she came out, she was wearing my clothes.
The flannel shirt hung past her thighs, the sleeves rolled to her wrists.
The sweatpants were cinched as tight as they’d go and she still had to hold them up with one hand.
She looked absurd. She looked beautiful.
She looked like she belonged in my shirt, in my cabin, in the space I’d built specifically to keep the world out.
She walked straight to me and wrapped her arms around my waist. Face in my chest. The damp warmth of her hair seeping through my shirt. No hesitation, no asking, no testing. Just contact. Like she knew exactly what I needed before I did.
“You are really too comfortable,” I said, looking down at the top of her head.
“You should know that by now,” she said into my shirt.
I made coffee. Strong and black for me, the way she liked it for her (cream, sugar, what she called “adult hot chocolate”). We sat across from each other at the table, and the rain filled the silence between sips.
She didn’t bring up the photo. She talked about her students for a while, the new art project she was planning, the way one of the kids had asked her if clouds were made of marshmallows and she’d said “what do you think?” and he’d said “I think yes” and she’d said “then let’s find out” and they’d spent the afternoon learning about evaporation.
She told it with her hands, animated and bright, and I listened and drank my coffee and let the warmth of her voice fill the cabin the way the woodstove never could.