Page 26 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

"I've noticed."

It takes twenty minutes to get the twins settled. Blankets come off my own bed and double up on the floor by the window, Biscuit commandeered as a pillow the size of a small ottoman, both kids full of cocoa and adrenaline and the particular exhaustion that comes from a full day of weather-based excitement. Eli's narrating the storm to Josie in increasingly dramatic terms, something about survival rations and rescue missions, and Josie's listening with her eyes already at half mast, one hand fisted in Biscuit's fur.

"Are we having an adventure?" she asks, fighting a yawn.

"You're having a sleepover," I tell her. "With snow."

"Same thing." She's asleep before I finish getting the second blanket over her, and Eli goes down not five minutes later, mid-sentence, some story about a snowplow left unfinished.

That leaves Jenna and me by the window, candlelight throwing soft shapes across the walls, the generator running low and steady somewhere beneath the floor, snow coming down outside in a silence so complete it swallows the whole valley. She's got both hands wrapped around a second mug of cocoa, knees pulled up on the armchair, and for a long minute neither of us says anything, and it isn't the careful silence we've been living in all week. It's just quiet, the kind two people can sit inside without needing to fix it.

"Thank you," she finally says. "For this. For all of it."

"You'd have frozen in that car."

"I know. Still. Thank you." She looks toward the twins, both dead asleep in a tangle of blankets and dog. "They're going to talk about this for a month."

"They're not wrong to."

She's quiet for a moment, turning her mug slowly between both hands, and when she looks up at me again there's a question sitting behind her eyes that she hasn't decided yet whether to ask out loud.

"What?" I say.

"Why me? You said nobody's been up here in years. Why us, tonight, out of everyone in this town you could have put in a truck and sent to Dot's floor instead?"

I could deflect. I've spent three weeks deflecting, careful and polite, exactly the kind of man who signs invoices without looking up. Something about the storm, the candlelight, the fact that there's nowhere left in this room to retreat to, makes the deflection feel like more work than the truth.

"I don't let people up here," I say. "Ever. Gunny's been up twice in six years, both times to fix something."

"That's not an answer to why me."

"Because the alternative was you and the twins freezing in a car, and even I'm not stubborn enough to let that happen over a rule I made for myself." I turn the mug in my hands, watching steam curl off the top. "That's not the whole answer either."

"What's the whole answer?"

"I don't know yet. I'm working on it."

She laughs, soft, surprised out of her. "That's the most honest thing you've ever said to me."

"Low bar."

"That's my line."

"I'm allowed to borrow it. You said it to me once, when I needed it more than I could admit."

The wind picks up outside, rattling the old window in its frame, and neither of us moves to check on the twins, both of us trusting the dog to sound an alarm if one's needed. Jenna sets her mug down on the floor and pulls her knees in tighter, and when she speaks again her voice has dropped, quieter, like she doesn't want to wake the room even though the room's already asleep.

"Can I ask about the photograph?"

I don't answer right away. She doesn't fill the silence, doesn't push, just waits with the same patience she gave me the day the nail gun took me somewhere else entirely.

"Not tonight," I say. "Not because I'm hiding it. Because I don't have the words lined up yet, and I'd rather give you the real version than a bad first draft of it."

"Okay." She says it the same way she said it downstairs, simple, no argument. "I'll hold you to the real version someday."

"I'd rather you did."

We keep talking after that, about nothing that matters and everything that does. Her childhood two states from here. The twins' first steps. The sound a Humvee makes over gravel. The funniest thing Gunny's ever said with a straight face. None of it's urgent. All of it's true. Somewhere in the middle of it, the space between our two chairs closes without either of us noticing, until her knee is nearly touching mine and neither of us moves it back.