The Driveways He Knows
Jim Hedger can tell you the age of a tree from the sound the axe makes. He can read a driveway the way other men read faces. He married his wife at twenty-two, buried his father without ceremony, and has spent three decades arriving on time and leaving without lingering. He's the man everyone in Collinsvale relies on and nobody truly knows. That's been fine — until the morning the hills he grew up in started keeping secrets bigger than his own.
The thing about Jim Hedger is that he's funny. Not the kind of funny that announces itself — the kind that arrives two beats after you've stopped expecting it, delivered with a face so straight you're laughing before you've worked out why. He'll split a cord of firewood before breakfast, drive it halfway across the valley, and say three words to the client — two of which will be exactly the right ones. The third he'll keep for himself.
His father taught him silence, sawdust, and the stubborn belief that showing up is the purest form of love. Karen taught him that wasn't always enough. Between them, the hills, and decades of timber country, they've shaped a man who sees everything and says almost nothing — who carries the quiet weight of a community on shoulders broad enough that nobody thinks to ask if it's heavy. Who expresses devotion through maintenance, through presence, through the dogged act of being where he said he'd be, doing what he said he'd do, long after the shine has worn off the promise.
But Jim Hedger's story isn't about steadiness. It's about what happens when the ground beneath a steady man begins to move — and he has to decide what's worth holding onto.
