I’ve never known a life that didn’t start with the sound of an axe splitting through pine.

The cold crept into my bones before I ever learned how to write my own name. I was fifteen the first time my hands blistered from work that didn’t stop just because I was tired. My father, a man whose silence said more than most men’s sermons, put the axe in my hands the same winter my mother’s cough started sounding like a death sentence. He was a lumberjack, like his father before him. We didn’t have a choice, not with our kind of blood, not with the kind of bills that sat heavy on the table and didn’t care if you were only a boy.

Now I’m thirty. A man. My father’s gone, buried beside my mother on the edge of our land under two crooked stones that the snow eats every winter and the grass forgets every spring. They didn’t leave much behind. Just this cabin, some tools, and a name that still means something to the men around here, even if the world forgot people like us exist.

The cold this morning was cruel—the kind that doesn’t just sting your skin but presses down on your spirit, reminds you that you’re alive only because pain says so. It was maybe minus six, or worse. My breath hung in the air like ghost smoke. Every swing of the axe was a rhythm, a prayer, a way to remember that my body still worked, that the ache in my shoulders meant I wasn’t buried next to them.

That’s when I saw her.

She didn’t belong here—nobody passed through this way unless they were lost or looking for something. She was bundled up like a snowstorm was trying to take her whole—hat pulled low, scarf coiled around her neck like a secret, gloves that looked too thin for work but too tough for vanity. She was just walking the trail near the tree line, boots crunching over the frost-bitten path, not looking at me, not hurrying either.