Page 48 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

"Then you'll know that, too, and you can decide what to do with it. Right now you don't know anything except what your own fear is telling you, and your fear's a terrible narrator. It's been wrong before." She reaches across and squeezes my hand once, brief and firm. "You survived a man who used silence as a weapon. That doesn't mean every silent man is doing the same thing. Give this one a chance to tell you what's actually going on before you blame him for something he didn't do."

It's good advice, the kind I'd hand to anyone else in my position without hesitating, and I know it the second she says it. I still leave the Busy Bean twenty minutes later without calling him, because knowing the right thing and having the nerve to do it are apparently two entirely different skills I haven't finished learning yet.

The rest of the day goes to telling myself I'll call tonight, and then telling myself I'll drive over tonight instead, and then losing my nerve on both counts once the twins are down and the cabin's gone quiet around me. I sit at the kitchen table with my phone in my hand and Rafe's name on the screen for a long time, thumb hovering, and in the end I set the phone down without doing anything at all, which is its own kind of answer even if I don't like what it says about me.

Close to eleven I give up on sleep entirely and get in the car instead, telling myself I just need air, that I'm not driving anywhere in particular, and somehow I still end up on the road that runs past the brewery, slowing without meaning to the second the building comes into view.

The taproom's dark, closed up for the night, but there's a light on in the brewhouse, one square of gold against a building that should be empty at this hour, and something in my chest pulls tight at the sight of it. I picture him in there alone, moving between tanks he doesn't actually need to check again tonight, doing the same thing I'm doing out here in a parked car, avoiding a conversation neither of us seems ready to start.

I pull into the lot before I've fully decided to, gravel crunching under the tires louder than it should be this late, and cut the engine, and just sit there for a minute with my hands still on the wheel, watching that one lit window like it might tell me something if I stare at it long enough.

I could go up. I could knock on that door right now and ask him straight out what Maggie told me to ask, get it over with instead of sitting out here replaying the same worried loop I've been running for days. My hand's actually on the door handle before I stop myself, before I really look at what I'm about to do, walk in on a man clearly trying to hold himself together alone and demand he explain it to me on my timeline instead of his.

That's not fair to him. Whatever this is, he's not doing it to me. He's doing it despite me, working himself into the ground rather than let whatever this is anywhere near the people he cares about, and pushing my way in tonight would be about easing my own fear more than it would be about actually helping him.

I let go of the handle and sit back, watching the light a while longer, close enough to see a shadow cross behind the curtain once, there and gone.

"Okay," I say out loud, to nobody, to the empty car, to the ridge sitting dark and quiet against the sky beyond the parking lot. "Tonight you get your silence."

I mean it, too, sitting there in the cold with my breath fogging the windshield. Tonight I'll let him have whatever this is without pushing on the door.

Tomorrow's a different promise. Tomorrow I'm knocking, whether he's ready for the question or not, because Maggie's right about one thing even if I hate hearing it. My fear's a terrible narrator, and it's had the microphone long enough.

I start the engine and pull back out onto the road, glancing once more at that square of light in the mirror before it disappears behind the trees, and I drive home already rehearsing what I'm going to say tomorrow, already bracing for whatever answer's waiting on the other side of finally asking.

22

RAFE

Every year on this day I close the brewery two hours early, tell Gunny I've got errands that can't wait, and drive the truck up the ranch road to the overlook above the north pasture, the same spot my grandfather used to sit with a thermos and count cattle that didn't need counting. I don't count anything up here. I bring a bottle I never finish and a set of dog tags I've carried in my jacket pocket since the day the Army handed them back to me instead of to the family they should have gone to, and I sit on the tailgate until the cold gets far enough into my hands that I can't tell exactly which finger the tags are pressing into anymore.

Gunny didn't ask this morning. He never does, not on this particular day, just nodded once when I told him I was heading out early and said he'd close up, and something in the way he said it told me he's known for years what today actually is, even if he's never once pushed me to say it out loud. I appreciate that about him more than I've ever told him.

The ridge goes gray and then gold and then gray again while I sit here, the whole valley laid out below like something I once knew how to protect. Most years the memory comes at me in pieces, easier to survive that way: the sky turning almost exactly the color it did that morning, the smell of diesel and dust surfacing even though it isn't in this air, a voice coming through on a radio and gone before I can hold onto it.

This year it doesn't come in pieces. It comes all at once, whole and merciless, like six years of pressure finally breaking the door down.

I see the whole patrol route laid out the way it looked on the map that morning, a road we'd cleared a dozen times without incident, and I hear the intel brief I trusted because I had no good reason not to, a source who'd been reliable for months, a route flagged clear by people whose entire job was flagging it accurately. I made the call to take that road because the alternative cost us forty extra minutes we didn't have, and forty minutes mattered that day for reasons that don't matter anymore.

I hear Danny's voice before I see anything else, easy and unbothered the way it always was, cracking some joke about the MRE he'd been saving since we crossed the wire, and I hear my own voice telling him to save it for when we're back, and I hear the sound that came after that wasn't like the movies at all, flatter and closer and wrong in a way nothing prepares you for no matter how many times you've trained for it.

He took the round that had my name on it. That's the plain fact of it, the one I've never said out loud to a single living soul, because saying it out loud makes it real in a way just thinking it never does. I was two feet to his left one second and then he'd moved, some instinct or some accident or some plain bad luck, and the round meant for the space I'd been standing in caught him instead, and I went down beside him with my hands doing everything they were trained to do and none of it mattered, because some math doesn't come back no matter how hard you work the problem.

Twelve minutes for exfil to reach us. I've never forgotten that number and never will, twelve minutes I spent with my hands pressed against a wound that wasn't closing, telling him he was fine, telling him to hold on, telling him things I don't remember choosing to say because some part of my brain had already started running on nothing but training and refusal. He stopped answering me somewhere around minute nine. I kept talking anyway, all the way until the bird finally set down, because stopping felt like agreeing to something I wasn't ready to agree to.

I sit with the tags in my palm, running my thumb over the stamped letters the way I have every year on this day, and for the first time the whole thing plays start to finish without my mind finding some smaller, more survivable piece to hide inside.

Headlights swing up the ranch road below me, cutting through the dark in two long beams that catch the fence line before they catch me, and I know the sound of that engine before I see the truck itself, the particular note it makes downshifting for the grade. Jenna's truck crests the hill and slows, gravel crunching under the tires, and she parks a few feet from mine and gets out without hurrying, like she's got nowhere else in the world she needs to be tonight.

She doesn't ask what today is. She doesn't ask why I'm sitting alone in the dark on a ranch road with a bottle I haven't touched, doesn't ask why Gunny told her, if he did, or how she found me up here at all. She just walks over, climbs up onto the tailgate beside me without being invited, and sits close enough that her shoulder settles against mine, and waits.

"You don't have to talk," she says, after a while, quiet. "I just didn't want you doing whatever this is by yourself tonight."

"How'd you find me?"

"Gunny. I showed up at the brewery an hour ago ready to knock some sense into whatever's been going on with you, and he took one look at my face and told me where you'd be instead of making me guess." She glances at the tags still turning between my fingers. "He didn't tell me anything else. Just the road."

"That sounds like him."