Page 52 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

"Correct. Left at the marker, all the way through."

"Got it. Left at the marker." He says it back to me like he's reading it off a checklist of his own, and something about hearing my own habits coming out of an eight-year-old's mouth lands somewhere I wasn't braced for.

Josie skips the safety briefing entirely, already halfway up the hill by the time I finish explaining hazard clearance to her brother, dragging her sled behind her with the single-minded focus of someone who heard approximately none of what I said and doesn't feel she's missed a single important thing.

"You didn't listen to any of that," I call after her.

"I didn't need to. I'm either going to be fine or I'm going to be hilarious. Both outcomes are good ones."

"That's not how risk assessment works."

"It's how mine works." She plants her sled at the top without breaking stride, entirely unbothered by several years of formal training I could have offered her for free, and I decide, watching her go, that some people are simply born immune to a briefing.

Josie goes first, screaming the entire way down in a pitch that startles a flock of birds off the fence line, and lands in a heap of laughing snow gear at the bottom, completely unhurt and immediately demanding a second run. Jenna goes next, less screaming, more control, and still ends up sideways in the last ten feet, sliding to a stop on her back with her arms spread out like she's making a snow angel out of sheer momentum.

"Graceful," I call down.

"You go, then, if you're such an expert."

I am not, in fact, an expert, a truth I discover about four seconds into my own run when the sled hits a bump I somehow missed on two separate walking inspections and sends me airborne for a solid half second before I land, hard, and finish the run on my back with snow packed into places snow has no business being.

"That was not tactical," Josie informs me, standing over me with her hands on her hips.

"No. It was not."

"You checked the hill twice."

"I did."

"And you still crashed."

"I did that too." I sit up, spitting snow, and something about the sheer indignity of it, four walking inspections and two first aid kits undone by a bump the size of a dinner plate, startles a laugh out of me that keeps going longer than the joke actually deserves.

Eli's run is the one that gets me. He goes down with total confidence, aimed dead center at the marker exactly like I taught him, and then about halfway down decides, apparently on instinct, to lean hard left in what he later describes with complete sincerity as "aggressive steering," which sends the sled into a spin that catches my legs out from under me as I'm walking back up, and I go down into a snowbank headfirst with my boots the last thing visible above the surface.

"Aggressive steering," Eli repeats, delighted, once I've clawed my way back upright with snow in places I didn't know could hold snow. "It's a real strategy. I saw it on a sledding video."

"It's a real way to end up needing the second first aid kit."

"Did it work, though?"

"You took me out from a standing position on flat ground. I'd call that a resounding success by whatever standard you're operating under."

He looks so genuinely proud of this that I don't have the heart to explain the several ways it violated basic sledding safety, and Jenna's laughing hard enough at the sight of me that she has to sit down in the snow to manage it, and Josie's narrating the whole disaster to nobody in particular with the enthusiasm of a sports broadcaster covering a historic upset.

We break for cocoa around midafternoon, all four of us crowded onto the tailgate with steam rising off four mugs into air cold enough to bite, and I sit there with my hands wrapped around the warmth and my whole body aching in ways I haven't felt since actual training exercises, and something in my chest goes quiet and strange, settling into a shape I don't fully recognize.

"You're doing the thinking face," Josie says, studying me over her mug.

"I don't have a thinking face."

"You do. Mom has one too. It runs in families." She says it so casually, so entirely without weighing the size of what she's just implied, that I nearly choke on the cocoa, and Jenna's eyes cut to mine for exactly one second before she recovers and changes the subject to whether we've got enough daylight left for one more run.

I don't say anything, because there's nothing safe to say to that, but the word sits there anyway, quiet and enormous, while the twins argue about who gets the good sled for the next attempt. The word is families, and it won't let go of me. Somewhere between the first crash and the second mug of cocoa, without any moment I could point to, I stopped thinking of this as time spent with people I care about and started thinking of it as mine.

I swore off exactly this six years ago, standing over a bag with somebody else's name on it. Grief makes you certain of things you shouldn't be certain of, and I was sure I'd never again let my whole life depend on people I could lose. I built the brewery instead, something steady and containable. I never planned on four snow-soaked people crowded onto my tailgate becoming the thing everything else gets measured against now.

It should terrify me. Some distant part of it does. But mostly, watching Eli try to talk Josie out of the good sled using logic that would not hold up in an actual court of law, I just feel lucky, which might be the single most destabilizing realization of the entire year, including the one I had on a ranch overlook eleven days ago.