Page 18 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

I'm on the floor behind the bar before my mind finishes the sentence it was building. My back's against the cooler, knees pulled in, heart slamming so hard I can feel it in my teeth, and the taproom around me has gone somewhere else entirely, walls that don't match, heat that doesn't match, dust in the air that tastes like a place six years and eleven thousand miles from this one. Somebody's shouting. I can't tell if it's real or not. My hands are doing something I didn't order them to do, flat against the concrete, bracing for a floor that isn't going to move.

Time stops making sense the way it usually does when this happens. There's no clock in it, no order, just pieces that don't connect: the smell of dust and diesel that isn't in this room, a sound like a door slamming that might just be my own pulse, a voice giving orders I can't place. Somewhere underneath all of it, some small clear part of my brain knows none of it is actually here. Knowing that doesn't help much. The rest of me isn't listening yet.

It passes in under a minute. It feels like an hour, the kind that doesn't end so much as slowly let go, my vision narrowing back out from a tunnel to an actual room, sound coming back in pieces, the wet-vac first, then Gunny's voice somewhere far off telling someone to give me space.

Josie's the first thing I actually see clearly. She's crouched a careful few feet away, knees to her chest, holding out a water glass in both hands like she's not sure how close is safe to get, but she's not leaving either. She's not crying. She's not looking at me like I've become something frightening.

"You want water?"

I can't answer that yet. My throat isn't working right.

"It's just water," she says again, patient, like I might not have understood the first time. "I got it myself. I didn't spill it."

Eli's not next to her. I find him a second later standing at the front door, arms crossed, feet planted, watching the parking lot like he's been posted there on assignment.

"What are you doing?"

"Watching the door." He doesn't turn around. "In case it happens again. I'll see it coming before you do."

"Eli."

"I'm not scared." He finally glances back at me, and there's nothing in his face that resembles fear, just the flat, focused calculation of a kid working a problem. "You just need somebody watching the door for a minute. That's all. It's not a big deal."

That's what undoes me, worse than the shaking, worse than the floor still tilting faintly under me. There's no fear in it and no pity, just two kids treating the worst thirty seconds of my week like something to fix, exactly the way I would have handled it myself. Eli's watching the door because the door needed watching. Josie brought water because water seemed useful. Neither of them looks at me like I've broken. They look at me like I've got a problem, and problems get solved.

I don't have a response built for that. Twenty years of training taught me what to do when I fall apart in front of people who are afraid of me, or embarrassed for me, or trying too hard to pretend they didn't see it. Nobody trained me for two kids treating it like routine maintenance.

"I'm going to grab some air," I say, and my voice comes out steadier than I expect it to, which is its own small miracle. "You two did good. Both of you."

"Are you okay?" Josie asks it plainly, no drama in it, just information she wants.

"Getting there."

I get myself up, one hand on the cooler for longer than I'd like to admit, and cross the taproom toward the office with my legs working on some kind of muscle memory that doesn't require the rest of me to be fully online yet. Gunny's got the twins settled at the corner table by the time I reach the door, a juice box materializing from somewhere, Eli already narrating the whole incident back to Josie with visible pride, like it's a story worth telling instead of something either of them should have had to see.

The office door shuts behind me, and I stand in the middle of the small room with both hands braced flat on the desk, waiting for the tremor in them to settle. It doesn't, not right away. I stare down at my own fingers like they belong to somebody else, still riding the last current of something that started with a nail gun and ended with an eight-year-old standing guard at my front door like it was the most natural assignment in the world.

Josie's drawing is still tacked to the corkboard on the wall behind me, the yellow dog with the four legs and the ears that look like antennae, and I catch sight of it in the corner of my eye and have to look away, because right now even that feels like more than I can hold steady. I press my palms flatter against the desk and count my own breathing, in through the nose, out slow, an old trick from an old life that still works even now, even here, even with a dog drawing on the wall instead of a rifle in my hands.

I don't have a list for this. I've never had a list for this. Two decades of training built me systems for combat, for logistics, for grief, for nearly everything else. Not one of those systems accounted for two kids deciding, without being asked, that I was still worth staying for.

I hear the door open behind me.

I don't turn around right away. I know the weight of that step, the particular quiet of it, and some part of me has been waiting three weeks for this exact conversation to catch up with me, whether I was ready for it or not.

"Rafe."

Jenna followed me in.

9

JENNA

Ifollow him through the office door before I've fully decided to, the way you move toward someone before you've thought it through. He doesn't turn around right away. His shoulders are still set wrong, too high, too stiff, and his hands are flat on the desk like he's holding it down instead of the other way around.

I don't ask what happened.

I learned a long time ago not to push somebody for answers while they're still falling apart. Questions in that moment don't feel like concern. They feel like one more thing to manage. So I close the door quietly behind me, pull the second chair away from the wall, and sit down across from him instead. I don't reach for him. I don't fill the space with words that would only be there to make me feel less useless. I just sit, let the silence be enough, and wait to see if he wants company or just someone in the room.