"I locked myself in the bathroom on my wedding night—unaware my 6'8" husband was sitting on the carpet crying."

"Jonah! My God, Jonah!" I cried out, my small hands coming up to frame his freezing, rain-slicked face. "Are you hurt?!"

Jonah raised his storm-gray eyes. He wasn't bleeding, but his body was shivering violently, his broad hands resting flat in his lap, his expression completely hollowed out by a dark, agonizing shock.

"He followed me up here, Claire..." Jonah rasped out, his teeth chattering from the cold. "Miller came up the ridge on his quad bike to yell at me about the land lease... and then the old maple snapped."

I turned my flashlight beam toward Miller Vance.

Miller lay trapped beneath the three-foot-thick maple log, his chest pinned flat against the frozen mud. He was conscious, but his face was paper-white, his eyes wide with pure, pathetic terror as he choked for air under the crushing weight.

"Jonah... please..." Miller choked out, his voice weak, pathetic, and broken. "I can't... I can't breathe... the log... it's crushing my ribs... help me..."

I looked at the log. It weighed at least eight hundred pounds. No winch or quad bike could reach this steep ridge in the freezing sleet.

"Jonah," I said, turning back to my husband, taking his broad, frozen hands into mine, looking straight into his dark, fearful eyes. "You have to lift the log."

Jonah shook his head frantically, pulling his hands back as if they had been burned.

"No... no, Claire," Jonah wept softly, tears cutting clean tracks through the mud on his face. "If I lift it... if my hands slip... I'll crush him completely. Just like Luke. My father said men built like me put people in hospitals..."

White-hot, absolute fury flared in my chest—not at Jonah, but at the memory of a father who had spent fifteen years poisoning his son's soul with fear.

I grabbed Jonah’s broad lapels, pulling my five-foot-one frame up until my face was inches from his, my hazel eyes flashing with an unshakeable, sovereign fire.

"Listen to me, Jonah Blackwood!" I commanded into the howling storm, my voice carrying an absolute, velvet power that drowned out the wind. "Your father was wrong! You are not a monster! You are the kindest, gentlest, most noble man in this state! Your strength wasn't given to you to hurt people... it was given to you to save them!"