Chapter 12
SAWYER
Idrove to her apartment.
The truck ate the distance between the sawmill and Maple Street in under four minutes, which meant I was going too fast, which meant I didn’t care.
The engine growled through the turns and the tires barked on the wet asphalt and my hands were white-knuckled on the wheel, gripping it hard enough to feel the stitching through my skin.
I’d called her nine times. Nine. I’d counted each one, each ring that went on and on before dropping to voicemail, each silence on the other end that felt like a door slamming shut. By the sixth call, the phone wasn’t even ringing. She’d turned it off.
The apartment building looked the same. The old elm tree. The front steps. The door that I’d stood outside of a month and a half ago, pretending I was “just passing by,” pretending that I hadn’t driven across town specifically to stand near the building where she slept.
I took the stairs two at a time and knocked.
“Chloe.” I said her name through the door, loud enough for her to hear if she was on the other side, quiet enough not to bring the neighbors out. “Chloe, open the door. Please. Just let me explain.”
Nothing.
I knocked again. Harder. “Chloe.”
“She’s gone.”
The voice came from behind me. I turned. The woman from the apartment across the hall was standing in her doorway, a coffee mug in her hand and a bathrobe on her shoulders, looking at me with the sympathetic caution of someone delivering news they knew you didn’t want.
“What do you mean, gone?”
“Left. This morning. Packed her car and drove off. Said she wasn’t coming back.”
The hallway tilted.
“She left a key with me to give to the landlord,” the woman continued, taking a step back like she’d seen something in my face that warranted distance. “Said something about a family emergency. She was crying pretty hard, if that makes a difference.”
She wasn’t coming back.
I stood in that hallway and felt the ground crack open under my feet.
Not the sudden, explosive fracture of a bomb on a dirt road, but the slow, grinding collapse of something structural, something that had been holding everything else up, and now it was gone and everything built on top of it was falling.
I drove back to the mill. I don’t remember the drive. One second I was standing in the hallway, the next I was sitting in my truck in the yard, staring at the steering wheel while the engine cooled and ticked in the silence.
I called her again. Voicemail. Called again. Voicemail. I typed a message, stared at it, deleted it. What was I supposed to say? How was I supposed to explain through a screen what I hadn’t been fast enough to explain in person?
Rachel Winters. That was the woman’s name.
The woman who had shown up on my porch like a ghost from a life I’d already buried.
We’d dated, if you could call it that, for three months two years ago.
She’d wanted more than I was capable of giving, which was anything at all, and I’d ended it with the blunt efficiency that I ended everything.
She’d moved to Denver. I hadn’t heard from her since.
Until this morning, when she’d materialized on my porch, calling me baby, threading her arm through mine, performing a relationship that didn’t exist in front of the only woman who had ever mattered.
Chloe had seen that. She’d seen Rachel cling to me and call me her boyfriend, and she hadn’t stayed long enough to hear me deny it.
She’d looked at me with those blue eyes, the same eyes that had looked at me with tenderness an hour before, and in them I’d seen something switch off.
Something that had been open, warm, alive, clicking shut like a lock.
And she’d left.
Just like that. Without a word, without a fight, without letting me say the thing I needed to say: that Rachel was nobody, that it was over years ago, that the only person I wanted standing on my porch, in my kitchen, in my bed, was her. Was always, only, devastatingly her.
I sat in the truck until Josh found me.
He opened the passenger door and got in without asking, the way Josh did everything, by simply inserting himself into situations whether you wanted him there or not.
He had a look on his face that told me Dollie had already called him, and Dollie had been Chloe’s friend before she was Josh’s girlfriend, which meant the information network had already activated.
“I heard,” Josh said.
I said nothing.
“Sawyer. Talk to me.”
“About what.”
“About the fact that you look like someone just hit you with one of our logs.”
“I’m fine.”
“You are the opposite of fine. You’ve been sitting in your truck for forty minutes.”
I looked at him. He looked back. Steady, patient, annoyingly persistent.
That night, I ended up at Murphy’s. Not because I’d planned to, not because I’d made a conscious decision to walk into a bar and drink until the edges of the world went soft.
It just happened. The way falling happens.
You’re standing, and then you’re not, and the ground meets you with a certainty that feels like it was always going to end this way.
Josh came. Danny came. Even Marcus from the lumber yard came, though I hadn’t spoken more than ten words to him in three years.
They sat around a table in the back corner and they let me drink, not because they thought it was a good idea, but because they knew that trying to stop me was a project with no budget and no timeline.
The whiskey burned. Good. I wanted it to burn. I wanted something external to match the inferno happening inside me, because the alternative was sitting with the silent, airless devastation that had taken up residence in my chest the moment her car had pulled away.
“Why?” I said after the fourth glass. The word came out cracked. “Why didn’t she let me explain?”
Josh was quiet.
“I would have explained. It was nothing. Rachel is nothing. She showed up out of nowhere, she was lying, she was never my girlfriend, and Chloe just… left. She didn’t even look at me. She just walked past me like I was already gone.”
My hand tightened around the glass. The whiskey caught the bar light and turned amber and gold, and the color reminded me of string lights reflected in blue eyes, and I set the glass down hard enough to make it ring.
“Why did she leave just like that?” My voice was rising and I couldn’t stop it.
“I opened up to her. I told her about Jimmy. I told her things I haven’t told anyone in ten years.
I let her in. I let her all the way in, and the first, the very first time something looks wrong, she runs?
Without a conversation? Without giving me thirty seconds to tell her the truth? ”
The table was quiet. Josh’s hand was on his beer, unmoving. Danny was staring at the table. Marcus was very interested in his napkin.
“Why now?” The question came out like it had been torn from me, ragged and raw and bleeding. “Why now, when I finally let myself… when I finally…”
I couldn’t finish the sentence. Because finishing it meant saying the word, and the word was too big and too new and too wrapped up in a woman who was somewhere on a highway getting farther away with every second.
“When you finally let yourself fall,” Josh said quietly.
I looked at him. He looked back. No judgment. No pity. Just the steady understanding of a man who had seen me at my worst and hadn’t left.
“Yeah,” I said, and the word cost me everything.
I drank until Murphy started giving Josh the look that said “get him home before I have to,” and Josh drove me to the cabin, and I fell into the bed that still smelled like her and slept the black, dreamless sleep of a man who had run out of things to feel.
The next morning was brutal. Hangover brutal. The kind of headache that makes you understand why ancient civilizations thought pain was punishment from the gods. I showered, dressed, and drove to the mill because the mill was the only thing that had never left me.
Dollie was waiting.
She was standing by the gate, her red hair bright against the gray morning, her arms crossed and her face set in the expression she wore when she was trying to be diplomatic but was considering violence.
She saw my truck and walked toward it with a purpose that made two of my crew members step out of her path.
“Where is she?” I asked before she could speak. I’d gotten out of the truck and my voice sounded like gravel that had been run over by another truck. “Dollie, where did she go?”
Dollie looked at me. Her eyes were red, which meant she’d been crying, which meant this was worse than I’d thought.
“I don’t know,” she said. “She filed an immediate resignation. Called the school yesterday and quit. Her apartment is cleared out. She didn’t tell me where she was going.”
“She didn’t call you?”
“She texted. Two words. ‘Mom’s sick.’ That’s it.”
Her mother was sick. The information landed with a thud, rearranging the picture I’d been assembling. It wasn’t just Rachel. It wasn’t just the misunderstanding on the porch. Something else had happened, something bigger, and Chloe had been hit from two directions at once.
“Her mother has cancer,” Dollie said, her voice cracking. “I found out from her neighbor in Denver. Stage four. Pancreatic.”
The ground shifted again. Everything I’d been feeling, the anger, the hurt, the burning, righteous confusion about why she hadn’t let me explain, all of it rearranged itself around this new fact.
She hadn’t just run from me. She’d run toward her mother.
She’d been standing on my porch, still warm from my bed, and her father had told her that her mother was dying, and then Rachel had appeared and said the words “my boyfriend,” and the world had collapsed on her from every side at once.
And she’d done the only thing she knew how to do. The thing she’d told me about on a rainy night in my cabin, the thing that defined her at her core: she’d handled it herself. Alone. The way she’d always handled everything.
“I need to find her,” I said.
Dollie shook her head. “She doesn’t want to be found, Sawyer. Not right now. Trust me, I know her. If she’s not answering your calls, pushing harder will make it worse.”
“So, what? I just wait? I just stand here and hope she comes back?”
“I don’t know.” Dollie’s chin trembled. She pressed her lips together and held it. “I don’t know what you do. But I know she’s hurting, and I know pushing her when she’s like this is the wrong move.”
She walked away. I stood in the yard and watched her go.
Then I went inside the mill and picked up the heaviest piece of lumber I could find and worked until my hands bled and my muscles screamed and the pain on the outside was loud enough to compete with the silence she’d left on the inside.
It wasn’t enough.
It was never enough.
But I did it anyway, because Sawyer Cole knew how to survive things that should have killed him. He’d done it before. He’d do it again.
The cabin that night was impossible. Every surface held her. The kitchen where she’d made pancakes. The table where I’d told her about Jimmy. The bed where she’d lain beside me and whispered “goodnight, grumpy” and fallen asleep with my heartbeat under her hand.
I sat in the chair by the window and looked at the picture of Jimmy on the bookshelf. His grinning face. His easy laugh.
“She left,” I told him. “Just like everyone does.”
Jimmy didn’t answer. He never did. But in the silence of the cabin, with the first snow of November falling soft and white outside the window, I thought I heard something that sounded like my brother’s voice saying: Don’t give up on her, you stubborn idiot.
I didn’t sleep.
I didn’t sleep for a long time.