Chapter 21
CHLOE
Iwoke up to someone showering my face with kisses.
Small ones. Soft ones. On my forehead. My eyelids. The tip of my nose. The corner of my mouth. Each one deliberate and warm and placed with a kind of patient precision that could only belong to one person.
“It is too early,” I mumbled, burying my face into the pillow.
He kissed my temple. Then the spot behind my ear. Then the curve of my neck, and that one sent a shiver down my spine that made my toes curl under the blanket.
“Get up,” Sawyer said. His voice was low and rough with morning, the kind of gravelly sound that had no business being that attractive before sunrise.
“No.”
“Chloe.”
“The sun is not even up.”
“The sun is up. You are not.”
I cracked one eye open. He was propped on his elbow beside me, already dressed, his hair damp from a shower I had apparently slept through. He looked impossibly awake. Alert. Almost energized in a way that was deeply unfair for a man who claimed to hate mornings.
“Why are you dressed?” I asked.
“We are going to the sawmill,” he said. “I am introducing my daughter to my crew. And my future wife.”
Both eyes opened. I pushed up on my elbows and stared at him.
“When did I become your future wife?”
He looked at me with that steady, certain gaze that always made my stomach flip. No hesitation. No humor. Just a man stating a fact the way he would state that the sky was blue or that wood needed to be dried before you could build with it.
“I am not pursuing you for nothing, Chloe. I want you both. In the future. All of it.”
My heart did something violent and wonderful inside my chest. A twist. A lurch. The kind of sensation that made my eyes sting and my throat tighten, because this man, this stubborn, grumpy, impossibly serious man, had just told me he wanted forever before I had even brushed my teeth.
“Too sweet,” I said, because if I said anything else I was going to cry and it was too early for that. “Get up before our daughter wakes up and catches you being romantic.”
He almost smiled. Almost. The ghost of it was there at the corner of his mouth, and then he was pulling the blanket off me and I was yelping at the cold and stumbling toward the bathroom while he stood in the doorway looking satisfied with himself.
We got Emma ready. She was thrilled about the sawmill in the way that only a six-year-old could be thrilled about a place full of heavy machinery and sawdust. She put on her boots, her purple jacket, and insisted on bringing Sir Chomps-a-Lot because he had never seen a real sawmill before and it would be educational for him.
The drive was short. Emma sat in the back of Sawyer’s truck with her face pressed against the window, watching the trees blur past, narrating the journey to her dinosaur.
Sawyer drove with one hand on the wheel and the other resting on my thigh, and the weight of his palm, warm and steady, made me feel something I had not felt in a very long time.
Safe. Claimed. Like I belonged exactly where I was.
The sawmill was already alive when we arrived.
The crew was there, a dozen men in work boots and flannel, hauling timber and running machines and moving with the kind of practiced efficiency that came from working under someone who demanded precision.
They looked up when Sawyer’s truck pulled in, and I watched their faces change.
Surprise first. Then curiosity. Then, when Emma climbed out of the truck and stood beside Sawyer with her green eyes and her purple jacket, something that looked a lot like understanding.
“Everyone,” Sawyer said. He did not raise his voice, but the entire mill went quiet. That was the kind of authority he carried. He did not need to shout. He just had to speak. “This is Emma. My daughter.”
The silence lasted about two seconds. Then the men erupted.
Smiles. Whistles. A few of them clapping, one of them shouting something about hell freezing over.
Emma waved like a beauty queen on a parade float, completely unintimidated by the attention, and I watched Sawyer watch her with a look on his face that I wanted to photograph and keep forever.
“And this is Chloe,” he added, his hand finding the small of my back. “My future wife.”
“When did we agree on that?” I muttered.
“We didn’t. I decided.”
The men laughed. A few of them came over to shake my hand, offering names and congratulations and questions about how on earth I had gotten Sawyer Cole to smile. I told them it was a work in progress.
Sawyer gave us the tour. He showed Emma how the logs came in, how they were cut, how the blades worked.
He crouched down beside her and let her touch the bark, explaining the difference between pine and cedar and oak with the same patience and attention he brought to everything he cared about.
Emma listened with wide eyes, asking a thousand questions, and Sawyer answered every single one without a hint of impatience.
Then he let her try the hand tools. A small saw, scaled down, the kind used for detail work.
He stood behind her, his big hands covering her tiny ones, guiding her through the motion.
Her face was intense with concentration, her tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth, and when the small piece of wood came free she held it up like a trophy.
“I made it, Papa!”
“You did.”
“Can I make another one?”
“As many as you want.”
I stood to the side and watched them. My daughter and her father, covered in sawdust, working side by side at a bench that was too tall for her but that Sawyer had adjusted by stacking crates for her to stand on.
He was teaching her. Patiently. Carefully.
The way a father teaches a daughter something he loves, not because she needs to know it but because he wants to share it with her.
The morning was warm for late autumn. Sawyer had taken off his jacket and was working in just a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and the physical labor had a sheen of sweat on his forehead, along his neck, at the hollow of his throat.
Emma was the same, flushed and damp from the effort and the excitement.
I grabbed a clean cloth from the bench and walked over to them.
“Come here, baby,” I said to Emma, and wiped the sweat from her forehead, her cheeks, the back of her neck. She squirmed but let me do it, bouncing on her toes with the energy of a child who had found her new favorite place in the world.
Then I turned to Sawyer.
He was standing still, watching me, his expression unreadable.
I reached up and wiped the cloth across his forehead.
Gently. Down his temple. Along the line of his jaw.
He did not move. Just stood there, looking down at me with those green eyes while I wiped the sweat from his skin like it was the most natural thing in the world.
When I finished, he caught my wrist. Leaned down. And kissed me. Soft and warm and unhurried, right there in the middle of his sawmill with sawdust in the air and his crew pretending not to watch.
“Thank you, love,” he said against my lips.
I blushed. The heat hit my cheeks instantly, fierce and unstoppable, and I stepped back with the cloth clutched against my chest like a shield.
“Oooooh,” Emma sang from behind us. “Papa kissed Mama. Papa kissed Mama.”
“Eat your snack, Emma,” I said without turning around.
“Papa and Mama sitting in a tree,” Emma continued, undeterred.
“I will take away Sir Chomps-a-Lot.”
Emma went quiet. But I could hear her giggling behind me, and when I finally turned around she was grinning so wide I could see every single one of her missing teeth.
A truck pulled into the lot. Dollie’s truck, the blue one with the dent in the bumper that she refused to fix because she said it gave the vehicle character.
Josh was driving, and Dollie hopped out before the engine was even off, her red hair catching the sunlight, her boots crunching on the gravel.
“I heard there was a family introduction happening and nobody invited me,” Dollie called out. “I am offended.”
“You are always invited,” I said. “You just show up whether you are invited or not.”
“That is accurate.”
Josh went to join the crew. Dollie watched Emma for a moment, watched Sawyer crouching beside her at the workbench showing her how to sand the edges of the piece she had cut, and something soft crossed her face.
“Look at that,” she said quietly.
“I know.”
“That man is wrapped around that little girl’s finger.”
“I know.”
Dollie turned to me. I knew that look. The shift from casual observation to something deeper. She grabbed my arm and pulled me away from the group, toward the edge of the lot where a row of stacked logs created a natural barrier from the noise.
“Talk to me,” she said.
I leaned against the logs and looked at the sky. Blue and cloudless, the kind of October sky that made you believe the world might actually be good.
“He called me his future wife this morning,” I said.
Dollie’s eyebrows shot up. “He what?”
“Just said it. Like it was already decided. Like he had filed the paperwork in his head and was just waiting for the rest of reality to catch up.”
“That sounds exactly like Sawyer Cole.” She crossed her arms. “And what did you say?”
“I told him it was too sweet and to get up before Emma woke up.”
“Chloe.”
“What?”
“What are you actually feeling? Not the deflection. Not the joke. The real thing.”
I looked at my hands. Picked at a splinter of sawdust caught under my nail. The real thing. The real thing was terrifying and enormous and so full of light it hurt to look at directly.
“Do you think it is worth it?” I asked. “All of it. The risk. Moving back here. Being with him again after everything that happened. After Jonathan. After the divorce. After all the running. Do you think it is actually worth it?”
Dollie was quiet for a long moment. She looked out at the sawmill, at Sawyer lifting Emma onto his shoulders so she could see the operation from above, at Josh tossing a piece of wood to one of the crew members, at the mountains rising behind everything like a promise.
“I think you have spent the last seven years surviving,” Dollie said slowly.
“You survived losing Sawyer. You survived your parents dying. You survived Jonathan. You survived everything life threw at you, and you did it alone, and you did it for Emma, and you are still standing here. That is not nothing, Chloe.”
“That does not answer my question.”
“I am getting there. Be patient.” She turned to face me fully.
“The question is not whether it is worth the risk. The question is whether you trust yourself to know when something is real. You trusted Jonathan and it was not real. But that does not mean your judgment is broken. It means you were grieving and alone and someone took advantage of that. That is on him. Not on you.”
My eyes burned. I blinked hard and looked away.
“Sawyer Cole is not Jonathan,” Dollie continued.
“He is grumpy and stubborn and terrible at talking about his feelings, but that man has been waiting for you for seven years without even knowing if you were alive. He turned down every woman in this town. He built a cabin and lived in it alone and punished himself every single day for not being enough to make you stay. And now you are here and he is out there carrying your daughter on his shoulders like she is the best thing that ever happened to him. If that is not real, Chloe, then nothing is.”
A tear slipped down my cheek. I wiped it away with the back of my hand.
“I am scared,” I said.
“Good. You should be. Love should scare you a little. It means you have something worth losing.” She bumped my shoulder with hers.
“But you are not alone this time. You have me. You have Josh. You have Emma. And you have that ridiculously attractive grumpy man over there who just called you his future wife before breakfast. Let it be worth it, Chloe. You deserve that.”
I looked back at the sawmill. Sawyer had put Emma down and was showing her something in his hands, a small carved piece of wood that he must have been working on between tasks.
Emma held it up to the light and squealed, and Sawyer looked at her the way the sun looks at the horizon.
Like she was the only thing worth rising for.
“Okay,” I said quietly.
“Okay what?”
“Okay, it is worth it.”
Dollie smiled. Wide and warm and the kind of smile that said she had known the answer before she asked the question but needed me to say it out loud.
“Obviously it is,” she said. “Now go tell your future husband to stop being so adorable. It is making the rest of us look bad.”
I laughed. Wiped my eyes. And walked back toward my family.