Page 29 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

The other silence is still sitting in that same inbox, further down, unopened since the night it arrived, a lawyer's name and a subject line about Walsh I still haven't found the nerve to answer. The storm buried it under enough noise that I almost forgot it was there. Almost. Some fights you can only take on one at a time, and this morning the only one I've got room for is a coffee cup on a desk fifteen feet from where I used to feel steady.

At the second light I check again anyway, and it's still nothing, and I feel something small and disappointed try to surface before I shove it back down where it came from.

At the third light I don't even pretend I'm not doing it on purpose.

By the fourth light I've stopped lying to myself about why I keep looking. It isn't really about the cup, and it isn't even about the kiss. It's about the silence that follows something that mattered, the ache of not hearing from someone whose voice I've suddenly started listening for. I've lived through worse silences before, the kind that meant something bad was coming. This isn't that. It still has weight, though, and I feel it between one red light and the next.

The last light before the brewery turns green just as I roll up to it, no delay this time, no excuse to check the screen one more time before I have to commit to driving instead. I set the phone face down on the passenger seat, out of easy reach, and tell myself firmly that I refuse to spend the rest of the morning waiting on four scrawled words to earn a reply.

I mostly believe myself.

The brewery comes into view at the top of the hill, snow still deep on the roof, smoke curling thin and steady from the chimney over the taproom, and somewhere inside it there's a man who kissed me like he meant it and then spent this morning making pancakes like it never happened. I don't know yet what any of that adds up to. I don't know if the cup on his desk is going to mean anything to him at all, or if it's just going to sit there getting cold while he finds a hundred careful reasons not to look at it too closely.

I pull into the lot anyway, because I've got payroll to run and a business to help hold together, and because whatever this is between us, I'm not ready to let one quiet morning talk me out of it. Not this soon. Not after everything last night actually was.

14

RAFE

I've got a rule, and it's a good one. Don't put anyone you might lose in the blast radius of your own life. It's simple, and it's worked. It got me through deployments, discharge, and every version of grief that came after, and it held up fine until a woman with a coffee cup and a four-word note walked straight through it like it was never there at all.

It's been four days of successfully not looking at Jenna across the office, and spectacularly failing to stop thinking about her anyway, which are not the same skill no matter how hard I try to pretend they are.

"You're doing it again," Gunny says, leaning against the doorframe of the brewhouse with a clipboard he isn't using for anything except a prop.

"Doing what?"

"Staring at the wall like it insulted your mother. You've done it every day this week." He taps the clipboard against his palm. "Usually right around the time she walks past with the mail."

"I'm working."

"You're pretending to work. There's a difference, and I've watched you do actual work for six years, so don't try that on me."

I don't answer that, mostly because he's right, and answering would just confirm it faster than staying quiet will. I go back to the inventory sheet in front of me, numbers I've already counted twice, and Gunny doesn't leave, which means this isn't over.

"You survived combat," he says, conversationally, like he's discussing the weather. "Actual gunfire. People shooting at you on purpose, with intent, and you came home and built a business out of nothing. And you're telling me the thing that's got you rattled is a woman who alphabetizes your invoices."

"That's not what's happening."

"That's exactly what's happening. I've got eyes, Rafe. I've had them on you the whole time." He sets the clipboard down on the nearest barrel, which means he's settling in, never a good sign for me. "You drove eleven miles at night to fix her woodstove. You let her and two kids sleep in the one room in this building nobody's allowed in. And now you can't manage fifteen feet across an office."

"It's not the same thing."

"It's exactly the same thing. It's just got worse odds, because a woodstove can't turn you down." He crosses his arms, unbothered by my expression, which has stopped working on him sometime in the last three years. "The guy who used to run toward the sound of gunfire for a living is currently getting outflanked by his own feelings. That's the part I find funny, if you want to know."

"I didn't ask."

"You never do. I tell you anyway. That's the whole arrangement." He picks the clipboard back up, then sets it down again like he's not quite finished. "I buried a wife, Rafe. You know that. I know grief, and I know the particular flavor of stupid that comes right after it, the kind that convinces you staying alone is the same thing as staying safe. It isn't. It's just staying alone."

"That's not the same situation."

"It's the exact same situation. Different war, same cowardice." He says it without any heat in it, which somehow makes it land harder than if he'd shouted. "For what it's worth, whatever you're protecting her from by staying over here instead of walking over there, it's probably smaller than whatever you're costing both of you by doing it."

He's gone before I can figure out whether that's the smartest thing he's ever said to me or the most annoying, and I sit with the inventory sheet in front of me for another ten minutes without writing down a single number.

I spend the rest of the afternoon patching up what Gunny just knocked loose, telling myself there's a right way to handle this and a wrong way, and somehow I talk myself into believing the right way looks a lot like retreat. By the time I've decided to actually do something about it, I've also picked the wrong thing to do, which tracks. I cross the taproom floor out of old habit, and by the time I reach the office door I've got an apology already built and rehearsed, clean and sensible, the kind of speech meant to put a problem back in its box.

Jenna's at her desk, invoices stacked in three neat piles, and she looks up when I come in with an expression that's careful in a way I recognize because I've been wearing the same one since the storm.