Page 85 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

"Jenna."

"You got exactly what you needed out of that hearing. Derek's boxed in, the kids are safe, every single thing you were so afraid would go wrong went right instead." My voice doesn't shake, though something underneath it wants to. "And the second it did, you bolted from the one part of this that was never actually a risk to begin with. You did it after the storm too. Gunny mentioned there were times before that, before I ever showed up in this town. Different reasons every time, same ending. You get close enough that it might actually cost you something, and you leave before it can."

He doesn't answer, and the silence tells me everything the words would have. I watch him absorb it the way he absorbs everything hard, jaw tight, weight shifted onto his back foot like he's bracing for a blow he's already decided he deserves.

"I keep waiting for you to tell me I'm wrong."

"I can't." His voice comes out rougher than I've ever heard it, stripped of the careful, contained thing he usually keeps wrapped around every hard sentence. "I don't have anything that isn't wrong."

"Then say the true thing instead. Just once. Not the speech about variables and liabilities and being responsible. The actual thing underneath it."

He holds my gaze longer than I expect him to, and for a second I think he might actually do it, might finally hand me the real sentence instead of another clean substitute for it. Then something shutters behind his eyes, the same door I've watched him close a dozen times now, and I know, before he says another word, that he isn't going to.

"You're not protecting us," I tell him, quiet now, because there's nothing left to prove by being loud. "You're protecting yourself."

He doesn't answer. He doesn't have anything to answer with, and we both know it, the silence stretching out between us longer and more honest than anything either of us has managed to say tonight. I wait one more second, in case there's a version of him that reaches for me instead of the door, and when it doesn't come I turn and walk back out through the brewhouse into the cold, the tears finally arriving somewhere between the doorway and the truck, exactly where I've been holding them since I first turned up his gravel drive.

42

RAFE

It's been three days since Jenna stood in my brewhouse and took the last of my excuses apart with six words, and I still haven't found anything to put in their place.

I close the taproom two hours early, send Wren and Marcus home with full pay and no explanation, because there isn't a version of the truth that fits in the time it takes to hand somebody their coat. Gunny's out on a delivery run he insisted on taking himself, which means the building's entirely mine for once, dark except for the pilot lights on the kettle and the one bulb over the desk I haven't turned on.

I don't reach for the legal pad. That's new. Three days ago I would have opened it out of pure reflex, built a column of problems and another of solutions, made the whole thing look manageable by turning it into paperwork. Tonight the pad just sits there, closed, because I've finally run out of the energy it takes to pretend a list would help.

Biscuit finds me on the floor of the brewhouse, back against the cold steel of Tank Two, and settles his whole enormous head into my lap like he's been waiting all day for permission. I scratch behind his ears without really registering that I'm doing it, and somewhere in the dark I start running Jenna's words again, the way I have every few minutes since she said them.

The building smells the way it always does after close, malt and cold steel and the faint sweetness of the last batch still working itself out in the tanks, a smell I used to find steadying. Tonight it just feels like proof of how good I am at building things that don't ask anything of me. Grain and yeast and water do exactly what you tell them to if you get the math right. They don't leave. They don't look at you across a porch and ask you to be honest. I built an entire life out of variables I could control because I stopped trusting myself with the ones I couldn't, and somewhere along the way that started looking like peace instead of what it actually was.

You're not protecting us. You're protecting yourself.

I've tried arguing with it a hundred different ways since she walked out of here, built whole cases in my head about duty and liability and what's actually safest for two kids who've already survived one man who couldn't be trusted to stay steady. None of the arguments hold. They fall apart the same place every time, right where she left them standing, because she wasn't wrong. She was just the first person willing to say it to my face instead of around it.

My phone rings a little before six, and I almost let it go, until I see Marisol's name on the screen and something in me won't let it ring a third time.

"Hey." I clear my throat, work to get my voice into something closer to normal. "Everything okay? Mateo good?"

"Mateo's fine. He's currently trying to convince me a dog would fix all of his problems, so you can imagine how my afternoon's going." She pauses, and the warmth underneath the words shifts into something more careful. "I'm calling about you, actually."

"I'm fine."

"You said that too fast for it to be true. I've gotten good at hearing the difference." She pauses again, longer this time, like she's deciding how much ground to cover before I can find a door to close. "Gunny called me last week. Said the custody thing settled, that you and Jenna won. He also said you looked like a man who'd just lost, not won, and that struck him enough to mention it to me."

"Small towns and their phone trees."

"Don't do that. Don't turn this into a joke so I stop asking." Her voice sharpens, gentle but immovable, the same tone she used the day I stood on her porch four full minutes before I could knock. "What happened, Rafe?"

I tell her. Not all of it, not the whole ugly shape of the last two weeks, but enough, the hearing and the win and the porch and the five words I offered Jenna instead of an actual reason. Marisol listens without interrupting, the kind of listening that costs something, and when I finally run out of words she lets the silence sit for a second before she answers.

"So you had the thing you've been circling for months, and the second you got it, you threw it away before it could throw you away first."

"That's a brutal way to put it."

"It's an accurate way to put it. I'm allowed both." I hear something shift on her end, a chair, a door, the ordinary sounds of a house that still holds a kid and a life in it. "Can I tell you something about my brother?"

"Always."