Page 8 of The Lumberjack and the City Slicker

Chapter 1

Greyson

A long time ago, I walked away from the parts of my life that made me feel like I was disappearing.

Because if I learned anything from my parents, it’s that you can have everything the world calls success and still feel completely alone.

Funny how that works.

You spend your whole childhood trying to be worth their attention, and then one day the phone rings and you realize you’ve been auditioning for ghosts.

I should’ve been furious with them. Should’ve spent years in therapy dissecting every cold look and every absent holiday until the words lost their meaning.

Maybe I was angry for a while.

But anger never settles right in me. It doesn’t land cleanly.

It slides off like water on stone—there, then gone—before I can shape it into something useful.

What sticks instead is the quiet.

The absence.

The hollow sense of of course when the world does what it always does and proves me right.

I hate being right all the time.

It’s like a fucking curse.

And the truth is, I’m done pretending my past was perfect.

It wasn’t.

Was the money to blame? Probably not.

Money doesn’t make people cold. It just gives them better ways to hide it.

The only good memories I have—the ones that stay sharp and bright—aren’t from ballrooms or boardrooms or the glossy photographs where I’m smiling like I’m supposed to.

They’re from Woodhaven, Maine.

From this mountain.

Vacations with my grandfather.

Cold air and salt, the scent of cedar and wet earth.

The steady weight of his hand on my shoulder when he showed me how to hold a tool, how to let the grain guide me instead of forcing it, how to build something that lasts.

He never talked down to me.

Never treated my brain like a problem to be corrected.

He just gave it something to do.

Chop wood. Tend the fire. Observe the wildlife. Fish in the creek. Care for the land.

And that’s why I came back here.