Acceptance, The

by Bernadette Marie

  In the last few hours, she’d had a chance to reevaluate her reasons for chaining herself to this tree. This was about so much more than the environment. It was about standing up for someone who couldn’t stand up for herself. Or in Harvey’s case, himself. It was about choices that had been taken away from her. It was about the fact that sometimes, no matter how wrong you were, you couldn’t undo what you’d done.

  Her goal wasn’t to stop the logging, this community’s lifeblood. It was to protect something beautiful and precious. If she could win this one small battle, do this one small good deed, save just this one tree, maybe it would somehow make amends in her heart for what she’d let happen to her family.

  A Jeep rattled up the steep gravel road and pulled off on the landing, followed a few seconds later by a police car. The sun chose that moment to peek through the saturated clouds scudding across the sky as though to mock Kat, and she clenched her jaw.

  A man exited the passenger door of the Jeep. His footsteps scuffed on the dirt road. Craning her neck, she peered through slanting late-afternoon shadows, making out only his easy gait and the set of his broad shoulders. Had they brought in a negotiator? He leaned into the police car for a minute, then stood, head down, hands on his hips, like a man bearing a heavy burden.

  She almost felt sorry for the guy. She might look like a waterlogged rat at the moment, but he had no idea what he was up against. A tiny smirk crept over her mouth.

  Now that this block of forest had been opened up to clear-cut logging, Harvey would have to watch while his family was torn away, one by one. She knew how he felt because the same thing had happened to her, until she had just one family member left. And she and Lacey weren’t even on speaking terms at the moment.

  She dug her fingers into Harvey’s sturdy bark. “What am I doing talking to trees instead of making things right between Lacey and me?”

  Soft footfalls on the carpet of needles behind her.

  She straightened as much as she could. The chain connecting the two sets of handcuffs slipped and pulled her down with it until she had to slump against the tree trunk.

  “Kat, what are you doing?” He sounded as exhausted as she felt. Sounded… disturbingly familiar.

  That voice. Evan. Here? Memories grabbed her heart and sliced through it like the blade of the nearby feller buncher waiting to chop the young trees from their roots—if the loggers could get it running again. She strained her eyes to the left, looking without turning her head.

  Evan was watching her, jaw clenched, rainwater slicking his blond hair.

  She blinked the water from her eyes.

  He was still there.

  Not a gorgeous hallucination. A gorgeous reality. Her pulse whumped in her ears.

  What was she doing? That was easy—she was running away from her failure to keep her family together. But what was Evan doing?

  “If you can’t figure out what I’m doing, I’m not going to tell you.” She stared straight at Harvey’s unforgiving bark. Nice. Even the tree had given up on her.

  The chain slipped downward again, pulling her into an awkward crouch.

  Evan laid his hand on her shoulder. His fingers brushed her cheek, heat rushed through her, and she shivered. This was why she hadn’t dated since they broke up the second time. No other guy even came close to making her feel the way Evan did, and when it came to relationships, she couldn’t settle. Too bad Evan was too pigheaded to try to make it work when the going got tough.

  “Peg asked me to come talk to you.”

  She shot up and hit the end of the chain, jolting her shoulders just about out of their sockets, and plopped to the ground. The spongy earth soaked the knees of her jeans.

  “Why? What happened?” There was only one reason Peg Kelly would send Evan five hundred kilometers north to the remote town of Mills Creek, to find her on a cut block another twenty kilometers up a treacherous logging road. “Is Lacey okay?”

  She closed her eyes and leaned her forehead on Harvey’s trunk, her heart aching for her kid sister. She never should have sold their house and moved so far away. But when the job came up, she couldn’t rationalize staying in Craigmont. Staying was something a mother might do, but Kat was Lacey’s sister.

  Please, let her be okay.

  Evan made a sound like he was grinding his molars. “I don’t know.”

  He didn’t know or he wasn’t telling her? Her temples throbbed, and the wind crept up the sleeves of the thick flannel jacket under her raincoat until she shuddered with the cold and the wet.

  “C’mon, Ms. Cherish, hang in there,” called the superintendent’s son, who might have sabotaged the feller buncher and cost Kat her job. Though, when it came right down to it, Kat was responsible for the actions of her students simply because she hadn’t forbidden them to come.

  This had gone too far. It started with the pregnancy and ended with Kat losing her sister and the man she loved. And all Kat’s running away from the truth had gotten her was being handcuffed to a tree and risking her career. She had to stop running from her mistakes.

  Besides, her bladder threatened to burst if she didn’t visit a washroom soon.

  She closed her eyes and took a shaky breath. Opened them and made eye contact with Billy, the head of the logging crew.

  “I’m ready to negotiate.”

  A collective moan rose from her students.

  Billy hitched up his pants and sauntered over.

  “What can I do ya for, Kat?” He grinned, showing off his new false teeth.

  She gave him a thin smile. “Leave fifty percent of the trees in the block, and I’ll walk away without another word.”

  “Haw, haw.” He shook his head. “We got the stumpage rights to the whole mountain. You can’t win this one. Why don’t you just take your pretty little head back to the school and teach those kids to read and write, and let me do my job. You know we put in more new trees than we harvest.”

  Her teeth chattered. “Because these trees aren’t just a bunch of unprocessed lumber. Animals live here, for one thing.” He snorted, and she narrowed her eyes to silence him. “And you know what happened after they logged above the Harrison Creek watershed.”

  He opened and closed his mouth. One point for Kat. An entire community lost its sole water supply in that fiasco, and the residents ended up taking a government emergency fund to move their homes and businesses to another location an hour away. The way Billy’s jaw was working, she knew he didn’t want a Harrison Creek incident on his hands.

  “I can’t leave half the trees.” He jutted out his lip.

  “Twenty-five percent, then.” She glanced at Evan to gauge his mood. He had his hands shoved practically elbow deep into his pockets, and a little muscle beside his mouth twitched. On a scale of one to ten, he was at a seven. Something was definitely up with Lacey, something bad. She had to move this along.

  “What do you say, Billy?”

  “Twenty percent.” No hesitation.

  “Including Har—this tree?” She arched a brow toward Harvey.

  Billy spluttered. “You know how many board feet are in that tree?”

  She was sure he’d tell her. And she was just as sure she’d take his next offer so she could get back home to her sister. She never should have left.

  “Twenty-five hundred. I like you, Kat. Everybody does. But you can’t go interfering with the livelihood of half the families in Mills Creek. No can do.”

  “Ten percent, and you leave this one.” She pointed. The gesture fell flat when the chain pulled taut after half an inch. She angled her head to indicate the majestic height of the Douglas fir.

  Hand to his bristly chin, Billy paced back and forth. She saw his daughter among the group of students. Watching him, waiting with Kat, hoping he’d make a fair choice. Billy’s daughter clasped her hands in front of her heart and stared for all she was worth at her father. He stopped, and his head swung over to where the kids were. The moment he saw his little girl, Kat’s battle was won.
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  “Ah, hell. We’ll leave ten percent of the trees”—he tugged off his hat and flung it to the ground—“and that one.”

  The kids roared and herded around Kat and Billy, and he grumbled and scowled in an effort not to grin as his daughter ran to him and hugged him.

  Finally, he recovered his wits enough to ask about the key to the handcuffs.

  It was safe, tucked way down in the front pocket of her jeans. Heat rushed up her neck. No way was she asking Billy or any of the kids to go fishing in her pants, no matter how many trees were at stake.

  Evan bent his head next to hers. His breath caressed her neck. His unique scent, sawdust with a hint of masculinity, tried to weave its old spell around her. “Where’s the key?”

  “Jeans pocket.” Her voice croaked. “Right front.”

  “Want some help?” He slid his hand to the front opening of her rain slicker, and his touch, even after so long, made her stomach wrench into a two-stranded knot of awareness and the urge to run.

  She couldn’t exactly run, and twenty or so pairs of eyes had homed in on every movement like the sharp gazes of adolescent hawks. She closed her eyes.

  “Just get it over with.”

  Evan’s breath hissed in, and he pulled back. With minimal contact, he stuck two fingers into her pocket and extracted the key. Then, as the kids began wandering off, somehow having sensed the excitement had passed, he unlocked the left cuff. It sprang open, and the chain clanked to the ground, tugging on her right wrist. He slapped the key into her free hand, sketched a salute to Billy, and marched off to the Jeep.

  “Wait.” Kat fumbled with the key, but her cold fingers might as well be sticks. The Jeep engine started. “Wait, would you?”

  She finally got the lock open and tossed the second set of cuffs down as she whirled to catch Evan before he could drive all the way back to Craigmont without telling her what had happened to her sister.

  As she turned, a grade-A head rush slammed into her. She stumbled. Her foot hit something hard, and she threw out her hands and managed not to fall facedown in the mud.

  The idle of the Jeep’s engine sped up as though Evan intended to leave her here not knowing what he’d driven all this way to say.

  She bolted upright, swiping her dirty hands on her coat as she sprinted for the Jeep. As she reached it, she banged her fist on the driver’s-side window. Evan rolled it down. “I have to go. You gonna be okay?”

  Sure, she’d be okay. She was perfectly capable of saying good-bye to the man she’d loved but couldn’t be with, getting into her car, and driving back to her house to call Lacey.

  But that would mean running away from yet another piece of her past. And she realized she didn’t want to run anymore.

  She shook her head, feeling her eyes start to water. Maybe he would assume it was from the rain.

  Evan scowled. “Get in.”

  She faked a cheerful thumbs-up to the kids and then hustled around to the passenger side of the Jeep and got in. Her keys were in her car, and someone would be sure to bring it down for her. People in Mills Creek were like that.

  Evan turned on the heater and pulled onto the rough road. Neither of them spoke while Kat let the warmth radiate over her. When it became clear that he wasn’t going to start the conversation on his own, she turned the fan to a quieter setting and turned toward him slightly.

  “So why did Peg send you all this way to talk to me?”

  He negotiated a switchback with both hands on the wheel. “You probably don’t want to hear it right now.”

  “I asked, didn’t I?”

  “Better wait until we get to the bottom.” He sped up enough that she sat back in her seat and held on to the handle on the door.

  “It’s that bad?”

  He winced at the high pitch of her voice. “Why don’t you wait and decide after you hear what it is.”

  “At least tell me whether it’s about Lacey or Peg.”

  He made a purely masculine sound of annoyance. “Neither.”

  Further prodding sent him into a deeper state of silent, heavy-lidded morosity.

  Almost half an hour later, Kat spied an opening in the trees that signaled the end of the logging road, which came out on the edge of the small town right near Kat’s house. The second they emerged onto the highway, she tapped Evan’s shoulder.

  “Spill.”

  He took a long breath and let out a longer sigh. “The school board called the emergency contact number in your file—Peg Kelly.”

  What would be so momentous that the school board would phone all the way to Craigmont? She’d cleared the protest with the board—and she hadn’t directly involved any students, so even though the higher-ups weren’t pleased about it, she was technically coloring within the lines. “And?”

  “Kat, you were chained to a tree. The loggers couldn’t work. Half the school apparently decided if you didn’t have to show up, they didn’t.”

  Her feet ground down on the floorboards. “And you know this… how?”

  “From Peg. And at the gas station when I stopped to fill up.”

  Of course.

  “And the diner when I grabbed a bite to eat.”

  Kat groaned. People in Mills Creek were like that, too. “I didn’t need to be rescued.”

  “Matter of opinion.” Evan turned a corner, and the lights of her little house shone a feeble welcome.

  “Look, I have a life and friends and a job I love. Why does that bother you so much?”

  “Do you really think you still have a job after what you did up there?” He groaned. “Come on, Kat, you’re smarter than that.”

  Her pulse hammered in her ears. “The whole time, you were helping get me out of the way so Billy and his guys can get on with their jobs.” Her fingers bunched the fabric of her coat into muddy wads in her lap. “I asked you if Lacey was okay, and you let me believe she was in trouble.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t just walk away from something you believe in.” He clenched his jaw. “How else was I going to convince you to unlock the handcuffs?”

  Hot fury blazed through her, and she punched his shoulder. “How dare you. How dare you?”

  The Jeep swerved and fishtailed into the gravel of her driveway, then straightened. “See why I didn’t tell you back there?”

  He pulled up by her front door and left the engine idling. She got out, slammed her door, and stomped toward the house. The window rolled down. She stopped and turned around.

  “What could you possibly know about whether I still have a job?”

  “I told you. Peg. The gas station. The diner.” His brow creased the way it did when he wasn’t trying very hard to be patient. “If you worked for me, and your protest caused an expensive piece of machinery to be wrecked, I’d fire you on the spot.”

  “Well, I didn’t wreck any machines, and neither did my students. I’m sorry you thought you had to come all this way, but I’m fine. My job is fine. My life is fine. So you can go home now.”

  She whirled to go. Oh, God. The machine was wrecked, and it was all her fault. Just like her family.

  “Kat.”

  “What?” He’d have to talk to her back. If she faced him, she’d start to bawl.

  “The kid who wrecked that machine?”

  Slowly she turned, the knowledge of what he was going to say inching up through her with more finality than a capital F on a report card. “Which kid?”

  The rain that had started high on the mountain found its way to her yard to pelt her head and hammer her raincoat and the roofs of the Jeep and her house. It reminded her of her urgent need to use the washroom.

  “I heard it was the school board superintendent’s kid.”

  Her confidence melted away faster than the rain was washing the mud from the Jeep. She backed up, turned, stumbled up her front steps. Remembered her house key was in her purse. In her car.

  “You okay?” he called.

  “Just peachy.”

  “You sure?”

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nbsp; She’d never been less okay in her life. “Yep.”

  She watched him drive away, presumably to be subjected to yet another earful of details about her from the night clerk at the local motel.

  Soaked and shivering, Kat couldn’t stand out here forever. She tramped around the perimeter of her house, jiggling windows and doorknobs. She’d locked the house up tight this morning, but maybe one of the locks was defective.

  None was. And her bladder couldn’t wait a minute longer. Kat dashed behind the nearest tree and made a pit stop. Feeling marginally better, she headed back toward the house. The rain swept down in sheets, and the wind flung it one direction and then another. The eaves provided little shelter.

  She could just slap herself for letting herself get all squishy over Evan instead of doing the reasonable thing and driving back down off the mountain in her own car, getting cleaned up, and talking to him over, say, dinner. Had she learned nothing from the way their engagement ended? Apparently not a whole lot.

  She debated walking into town to find a warmer place to wait, but even if most of the people she knew here weren’t up on the cut block, she doubted she’d find a friendly face after the superintendent’s son had wrecked an expensive piece of logging equipment—for all intents and purposes because of her.

  Deciding her best option was to wait for someone to bring her car, she huddled on her front porch with her collar pulled up over her head.

  All this way from home, away from the only family she had left, with her career in ruins. Everything she’d done, she’d done for Lacey, tried to be the best sister she knew how to be—and her life kept snowballing into an ever-bigger disaster.

  She wished she had known a better way to show Lacey how much she loved her. She wished her biggest dream hadn’t been demoted to a dirty family secret.

  She wished she’d been brave enough to defy her parents and tell Lacey the truth.

  The sound of an engine and the crunch of gravel filtered through her regret. She raised her head, blinking, and lifted her arm to block the bright glare of headlights. Nighttime? She realized she’d fallen asleep against the stair rail, and now every muscle mocked her for it.