Page 72 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

"It's the only rule Ms. Palmer gave us that actually makes sense." He considers this. "The no-glitter rule makes sense too, but Josie's not going to follow it."

"I heard that," Josie says, not looking up from where she's carefully printing her name onto the last of a stack of paper hearts, each one already dusted with enough gold shimmer to be visible from orbit.

"You were supposed to."

The twins' classroom is a disaster of pink and red construction paper by the time I drop them off, valentine boxes decorated within an inch of their lives sitting in a row on the counter, and I've barely made it to the car before my phone buzzes with a text from the volunteer coordinator asking if anyone's free to help chaperone the party that afternoon. I say yes before I've fully thought it through, mostly because staying busy today feels like its own kind of armor.

By the time I get back at one, the classroom already smells like sugar and craft glue, and Josie greets me at the door glittering, actually glittering, from her hairline to her shoes, a fine gold shimmer covering roughly forty percent of her visible skin.

"There was an incident," she informs me solemnly, like she's reporting a structure fire.

"I can see that."

"Marcus opened his valentine bag wrong."

"Is Marcus okay?"

"Marcus is fine. Marcus is glitter now too." She says this with the flat satisfaction of someone reporting justice served. "It's on the ceiling, Mom. Actual ceiling."

Sure enough, when I look up, there's a faint gold haze across the classroom's drop ceiling tiles that no amount of vacuuming is going to fully solve for weeks, and the teacher gives me a look over the heads of twenty-two sugared-up eight-year-olds that says she has already made peace with several of her life choices today.

I'm helping sort the last of the valentine cards into bags when Eli's teacher calls me over with the particular calm voice adults use specifically to keep children from panicking, and I find my son sitting very still at his desk, lips slightly swollen, a rash blooming faint and pink across his chin.

"He had two of the red conversation hearts," she says, already reaching for the nurse's line on the classroom phone. "Might be the dye. He says his mouth feels itchy, nothing worse than that so far."

"Eli. Talk to me."

"I'm okay," he says, sounding more annoyed than scared, which I've learned over the years is usually the more reliable indicator. "It just feels weird. Like when your foot falls asleep, but my lips."

The nurse checks him over, calls it a mild reaction, watches him for twenty minutes while I sit beside him holding his hand and trying not to let him see exactly how fast my heart's still going, and by the time we're cleared to go back to the party he's fully recovered and mostly annoyed that he missed the second round of cupcakes. Josie brings him one anyway, smuggled in a napkin, glitter still drifting off her in a fine, unstoppable haze.

"You're basically a warning label now," Eli tells her, inspecting the cupcake for damage.

"I'm festive."

"You're a hazard."

"Same thing, today."

We make it home eventually, both kids gold-dusted and sugar-crashed and thoroughly alive despite the day's best efforts to convince me otherwise, and I feel something in my chest loosen for the first time since I woke up this morning bracing for a fight that never actually came. Derek didn't call. Derek didn't text. Whatever he's doing with his day, it isn't happening here, in this house, on this particular one I refused to hand over to him.

I run the twins through a bath that turns the water briefly, alarmingly gold, get them into pajamas, and read half a chapter of whatever adventure book Eli's currently obsessed with before both of them go down easier than they have in weeks, worn clean through by sugar and glue and the sheer effort of an eight-year-old's version of a full day. I check the porch light out of habit before I head back downstairs, check the front door lock too, a small ritual I've added without really deciding to, and something about doing it tonight feels less like fear and more like simply taking care of the people I love, no different than checking that the stove's off.

Rafe shows up a little after the twins go down, later than usual, and there's something in the careful way he's holding the bag in his hand that tells me this isn't a normal, unplanned stop-by.

"You're doing the thing," I tell him, echoing Gunny without meaning to, watching him hesitate on my own front porch like a man bracing for an inspection.

"What thing?"

"The thing where you've clearly got something and you're deciding how to hand it over."

"Fair." He steps inside, and instead of handing me the bag right away he sets it on the kitchen table and pulls out a single bottle, unlabeled except for a strip of paper taped carefully around the neck, hand lettering in his own blocky, careful print. JENNA'S AMBER. Underneath it, smaller, a little pencil sketch of a dandelion, the exact one I remember from a shelf in his loft.

I don't say anything right away. I can't. I just turn the bottle slowly in my hands, tracing the edge of the paper label with one finger, the whole thing so plainly made by hand that I can see where he pressed too hard on one letter and had to start the strip over, a second faint outline of a J showing through underneath the final version.

"You kept the mistake in there," I say finally, running my thumb over it.

"Couldn't find more paper at eleven at night. Figured it added character." He watches me study it a moment longer before he continues, like he needs to see me actually holding it before he can finish explaining himself.