Chapter 31
SAWYER
She was wrapped around me before I could get my boots on.
Arms around my waist from behind, her cheek pressed against my back, her body warm and soft against mine in a way that made leaving the house feel like a punishment.
I was sitting on the edge of the bed, lacing up my boots, and she appeared behind me like gravity, pulling me back before I could move forward.
“Love,” she said against my back. “Are you really going back there?”
“Yes, love.”
She tightened her grip. I could feel her heartbeat against my spine, fast and steady, and the warmth of her breath through my shirt.
She was worried. She had been worried every morning since the shooting, watching me get dressed with those blue eyes tracking every wince I tried to hide, cataloging every stiffness, building a case for why I should stay home that she presented with increasing creativity each day.
She pressed her lips to the back of my neck. Then lower, to the spot where my collar met skin. Then to the side of my throat, and the kiss there was slow and deliberate and sent a current of heat down my spine that had no business existing at six-thirty in the morning.
“Are you trying to stop me?” I said.
“Does it work?”
Her mouth found the spot below my ear. The spot she knew. The spot that made my brain go quiet and my body go loud, and she kissed it with the kind of attention that suggested she had a very clear strategy and was executing it with precision.
I caught her hand. Pulled her around so she was standing in front of me, between my knees, her face level with mine because I was sitting and she was standing and the height difference worked in her favor for once. I wrapped my good arm around her waist and pulled her close.
“Love,” I said, looking up at her. “I will devour you tonight. But not now.”
She pouted. The full pout. Lower lip pushed out, eyes wide, the expression she used when she wanted something and knew exactly how effective her face was as a weapon. It was devastatingly effective. It almost worked.
I kissed her. Quick and firm, catching her lower lip between mine, tasting the coffee she had already been drinking, and then pulled back before the kiss could become something that would make me late for work.
“Papa is going to be late, Mama.” Emma’s voice came from the doorway. She was standing there in her pajamas with Sir Chomps-a-Lot under her arm and a look of patient exasperation on her face that made her look forty instead of six. “Don’t be too clingy.”
We both laughed. The kind of laugh that breaks through tension and fills a room, and Chloe pressed her forehead against mine and shook her head and I could feel her smiling against my skin.
“Your daughter just called me clingy,” Chloe said.
“She is observant.”
“She gets that from you.”
I stood up. Kissed Chloe one more time, on the forehead, quick and clean.
Crouched down and kissed Emma on the top of her head.
She handed me my keys, which she had taken to keeping on her nightstand because she liked being the one to give them to me each morning, a small ritual that she had invented and that I would protect with my life.
“Be safe, Papa,” she said.
“Always.”
The drive to the mill was familiar. The same road, the same trees, the same mountains standing silent and enormous on either side.
But there was a difference now. The road did not feel like an escape route.
It felt like a commute. A normal, everyday drive from a home with a woman and a child to a place where I built things.
The normalcy of it was still new enough to feel fragile.
Josh’s truck was already in the lot when I arrived.
Along with four other trucks, the crew’s, which was normal for a weekday morning.
What was not normal was that Josh was standing by the main building with his hands behind his back and a look on his face that I had seen exactly twice in the years I had known him.
The first time was when he proposed to Dollie. The second time was now.
“What?” I said, getting out of the truck.
“Good morning to you too.”
“You have a look on your face.”
“I have a face on my face. That is how faces work.”
“Josh.”
He grinned. Josh did not grin often. He smiled, occasionally, in the quiet way of a man who expressed his emotions in small doses. But this was a grin. Wide and open and carrying the energy of someone who was about to show you something they were proud of.
“We have a surprise,” he said.
“I do not like surprises.”
“You will like this one. Come on.”
He walked. I followed. Past the main building, past the lumber stacks, past the machinery shed, toward the road that led back through the trees to the property where my cabin stood.
The cabin that had been destroyed. The cabin that I had not been back to since the night we found it wrecked because looking at it felt like looking at a loss I was not ready to face.
Josh stopped at the tree line. Gestured for me to go ahead.
I walked through the trees. The path was the same, beaten dirt, pine needles, the familiar route I had walked a thousand times. The air smelled like sawdust and resin and something else. Something fresh. Paint, maybe. New wood.
I came through the clearing and stopped.
The cabin was rebuilt.
Not repaired. Not patched. Rebuilt. The same bones, the same foundation, the same layout that I had designed and built with my own hands years ago, but new.
Fresh logs, peeled and fitted, the joints clean and tight.
A new front door, solid and heavy, stained dark.
New windows with frames that gleamed in the morning light.
The porch, rebuilt with the same wide planks, the railing straight and level.
The roof, new shingles, dark and uniform.
I stood in the clearing and looked at my home and could not move.
Josh appeared beside me. He did not say anything. He stood there and let me look, the way you stand beside someone at a funeral or a birth, present but not intrusive, allowing the moment to belong to the person feeling it.
“The crew did it,” Josh said eventually, quiet. “Started the week after the break-in. Every guy on the roster put in hours after their shifts. Weekends. Evenings. Tommy drove in from Ridgecrest to do the roofing. Mike handled the electrical. Ben and his brother did the plumbing.”
I could not speak.
“We kept the layout exactly the same,” Josh continued. “Same rooms. Same sizes. But we added a few things. Deadbolt on every door. Security system. Motion lights. The windows are reinforced. Nobody is breaking through those again.”
I looked at the cabin. At every log, every joint, every nail that my crew had driven into the wood on their own time, with their own hands, for me.
For Chloe. For Emma. Men who worked hard all day and then came here and worked harder because their boss’s home had been destroyed and they decided, without being asked, that they were going to fix it.
“The inside is done too,” Josh said. “Furnished. Dollie handled that. She said you would pick the wrong couch so she did not ask.”
I walked to the porch. Put my hand on the railing. The wood was smooth under my palm, sanded and sealed, the grain tight and even. Quality work. The kind of work I demanded at the mill and had apparently taught well enough that my crew could reproduce it without me standing over them.
I opened the front door. The hinges were silent.
New hardware. I stepped inside and the smell hit me first, fresh wood and paint and the faint trace of cleaner, and then the sight of it.
The living room, new furniture, a couch that was deep and comfortable and the right color, Dollie’s choice and a good one.
The kitchen, new cabinets, new counters, the appliances clean and functional.
Emma’s room, painted a soft purple with a new bed and a shelf for her dinosaurs.
My room, our room, a bigger bed than the one I had before, new sheets, new curtains.
And above the fireplace, where Jonathan’s men had carved their message into the wood, there was nothing. Clean, smooth, unmarked wood. The wall rebuilt completely, every trace of the threat erased, replaced with the work of men who had chosen to cover hatred with craftsmanship.
Josh was in the doorway behind me.
“I cannot pay them enough for this,” I said. My voice was rough. Rougher than it should have been. I cleared my throat and it did not help.
“They do not want payment. They want you to bring your family home.”
I stood in the middle of my rebuilt cabin and looked at the walls and the floors and the windows and felt something I had not felt in a very long time.
Not since before the war. Not since before Jimmy.
A fullness. A belonging. The knowledge that the world, despite everything it had taken from me, had also given me this.
A crew who showed up. A best friend who organized.
A home that had been broken and rebuilt by the hands of people who cared.
I walked through the rooms again. Slower this time.
Running my hand along the walls the way you run your hand along something you built, checking the joints, feeling the grain, confirming that the thing is real and solid and will hold.
Emma’s room smelled like fresh paint. The purple was the right shade, soft and warm, and the shelf for her dinosaurs had been built into the wall at exactly the right height for a six-year-old to reach without a stool.
Somebody had thought about that. Somebody had measured the height of my daughter’s arm and built accordingly, and the thought of one of my crew members, some big, rough-handed man in work boots, crouching down to measure where a little girl’s dinosaurs should go, hit me in a way I did not expect.
The bathroom had been updated. New tiles.
New fixtures. The kind of small improvements that went beyond repair and into care.
In the kitchen, I opened every cabinet. Checked every drawer.
The plates were new. The silverware was new.
Even the dish towels, folded and stacked, were new, and I suspected Dollie’s hand in that because Dollie understood that a home was not made of walls and roofs.
It was made of the small things. The towels and the plates and the curtains and the way a door sounded when it closed, solid and final, the sound of something that was built to keep the world out and the people inside safe.
I pulled out my phone and called Chloe.
She answered on the second ring. “Are you hurt? What happened? Is everything okay?”
“Everything is fine.”
“Then why are you calling? You never call from the mill.”
“Pack the bags,” I said. “We are going home.”
“What do you mean home? We are home. Well, Josh’s parents’ house, but…”
“Our home, Chloe. The cabin. It has been rebuilt.”
The silence on the other end lasted three seconds.
Then four. Then five. And then a sound that I recognized because I had been hearing it more and more in the weeks since she came back, the sound of Chloe Matthews crying because something good had happened and she was not yet used to good things happening.
“I will be there in twenty minutes,” she said.
“Drive safe.”
“I will be there in fifteen minutes.”
I hung up. Looked at Josh. He was leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed, watching me with the quiet patience of a man who had all the time in the world and no intention of rushing whatever was happening on my face.
My eyes burned. The kind of burning that I had not felt since the day they told me about Jimmy. The kind that comes from somewhere deep and rises without permission and does not care that you are a grown man standing in a cabin you did not build.
“Thank you,” I said. My voice cracked on the second word. I cleared my throat but it did not help. “Josh. Thank you.”
He stared at me. Then his eyes went wide. Then the corner of his mouth twitched. Then the twitch became a grin and the grin became a smile and the smile became the most amused expression I had ever seen on a man who usually kept his face as neutral as a poker player.
“Sawyer Cole,” Josh said. “Are you crying?”
“I am not crying.”
“Your eyes are red.”
“It is the sawdust.”
“We are not at the mill. There is no sawdust in here.”
“There is sawdust everywhere. I am a lumberjack.”
“You are crying.” He was grinning so wide now that it looked like his face might split open. “After all these years. After everything. It took a purple bedroom and a dinosaur shelf to break you.”
“I am going to fire you.”
“You are not going to fire me. You are going to hug me.”
“I am absolutely not going to hug you.”
“You want to. I can see it. Your arms are twitching.”
“My arms are not twitching.”
“Sawyer Cole is standing in his rebuilt cabin with tears in his eyes and he will not even hug his best friend. I am telling Dollie about this.”
“Do not tell Dollie.”
“I am telling Dollie, Chloe, Emma, and every man at the mill. Sawyer Cole cried in his new cabin. They will love it.”
I looked at him. This man who had been my best friend for over a decade.
Who had driven me to the hospital. Who had organized a crew to rebuild my home without telling me.
Who had stood beside me through the worst of it and was standing beside me now through the best of it, teasing me about tears because that was what brothers did.
“Thank you,” I said again. Steadier this time. “I mean it, Josh.”
His grin softened into something warmer. Something real. He pushed off the doorframe and clapped me on the back the way men do when they mean I love you but would rather die than say it.
“You are a good man, Josh,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “Now get back to work before I take a picture of your face and make it the mill’s Christmas card.”
I walked back to the mill with my hands in my pockets and the key to the new front door in my palm and something in my chest that was warm and steady and felt, for the first time in a very long time, like it was going to stay.