Page 20 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

"Nine years. Together for two before that." I say the numbers plainly, the way I've learned to say them, stripped of the weight they used to carry. "It took me most of those nine years to understand that the version of normal I was living in wasn't actually normal. You get so used to bracing that you forget there's a version of a room where nobody's keeping score of who flinched first."

"How'd you finally see it?"

"The twins started flinching too. That did it faster than anything he ever said to me directly." My throat tightens on that one, even now, even this far removed from it. "I could absorb a lot on my own behalf. I couldn't watch it land on them."

He's quiet for long enough that I start to worry I've said too much, handed him something he didn't ask for and doesn't know what to do with. Then he speaks, and his voice has dropped even lower, rougher.

"That's the first true thing anyone's said to me in years."

"That's a low bar."

"Maybe. Doesn't make it less true." He leans forward slightly, elbows still on his knees, close enough now that I can see the exact shade of his eyes in the flat overhead light, close enough that the air between us has gone thick and different, charged with something neither of us is naming out loud. "Jenna."

"Yeah."

"I don't know how to do this part."

"Which part?"

"The part where somebody actually sees you and you don't immediately want to leave the room."

I don't have an answer ready for that, and for one suspended second neither of us moves, the space between our chairs somehow smaller than it was a minute ago, near enough that I think, with a kind of certainty that surprises me, that he might actually close the rest of the distance himself.

The door bangs open so hard it hits the wall.

"Rafe, I need you." Gunny's already talking before he's fully through the doorway, phone pressed to his chest like he's smothering it. "Banner company's on the line, and they're saying the rush fee doesn't guarantee delivery before the festival opens unless we confirm the second design change in the next ten minutes, and I don't know enough about fonts to make this decision without getting fired."

The moment scatters like a flock of birds startled off a wire, gone in every direction at once, and Rafe straightens so fast it's like the last several minutes never happened at all, shoulders squaring back into their usual careful lines.

"Tell them we'll take the original design. No changes." He's already standing, already halfway back to the man who runs checklists and counts hop shipments twice, and it should feel like nothing happened here at all. It doesn't, though, not to me, not with the way he pauses at the door and looks back at me for one more second before he goes.

It's not an apology. It's not an explanation either. It's a promise, plain as anything, that whatever almost happened in this office isn't finished, just interrupted, and he intends to come back for it the first chance he gets.

Then he's gone, already barking questions about font sizes down the hallway, and I sit alone in the small quiet office with Josie's crooked drawing watching me from the corkboard, trying to remember how to breathe normally again myself.

I stay in the chair longer than I need to, listening to Gunny's voice rise and fall through the wall, listening to Rafe's steadier one cut in underneath it, both of them wrestling a font decision like it's a hostage negotiation. My own pulse hasn't caught up yet. Some part of me is still sitting three feet closer to him than I was ten minutes ago, still feeling the exact moment everything between us shifted into something neither of us said out loud.

I told him about Derek. I haven't told anyone that particular version of it, not even Maggie, not in those exact words, and I don't know yet whether I regret handing it to him so easily or whether it's the first honest thing I've done since I crossed the state line. Maybe it's both. Maybe that's just what happens when two people who've spent years flinching finally stop, in the same room, at the same time.

I get up eventually, smooth my shirt, and go find the twins, because that's the job I actually came here to do today, paperwork and payroll and two kids who need feeding before too much longer. But some part of me stays behind in that office, in the exact second before Gunny burst through the door, wondering what would have happened if he hadn't.

10

RAFE

Main Street disappears under a river of lederhosen by nine in the morning, and by noon I've lost count of how many strangers have shaken my hand and thanked me for keeping this town's economy alive, like I built the whole festival out of spite for the mine that closed instead of a business that needed customers. I hate crowds on principle. There are too many bodies, too much noise coming from too many directions, no clean line of sight to any of the exits. I work the festival anyway, because Ridgeline's name is stamped on every banner up and down the street, and because, though I'm not saying this part out loud to anyone, Jenna and the twins are here somewhere in the middle of it.

Dot Higgins has turned her cider stand into what can only be described as a hostile takeover of the entire event. She's got a hand-lettered sign the size of a door, a line eleven people deep, and an operation running with more precision than half the actual vendors the town paid to be here.

"You're welcome, by the way." She hands a customer their change without looking away from me. "I've sold four hundred cups since sunrise. Your cider's the only reason half these people are still upright."

"I didn't ask for a cut."

"Good, because you're not getting one." She winks and turns back to the line, already shouting the next order before I've fully walked away.

I find Gunny near the pretzel booth, and the sight of him nearly stops me in the middle of the street. He's wearing actual lederhosen, suspenders and all, with a felt hat that has a feather in it he's clearly proud of.

"Don't."