Page 28 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

Breakfast happens fast and loud, the twins arguing about whether syrup counts as a topping or a delivery system, Biscuit stationed under the table with the focused patience of a dog who knows crumbs are inevitable, and through all of it Rafe stays exactly one careful step removed from me, refilling coffee, wiping counters, checking his phone for road updates, never quite landing in the same three feet of space I'm standing in for longer than a few seconds.

I've seen this particular kind of retreat before, not from him but from myself. More than once, in the years after Derek, something good would happen and some old, well-worn part of me got convinced the safest response was to pretend it hadn't. It isn't regret. I know that feeling too well to mistake it for anything else. It's fear, wearing regret's clothes because fear's harder to admit to out loud. It takes one to know one, my mother used to say, usually about something far less complicated than this. I never expected to find out how true it was, standing in his kitchen and watching him flip pancakes like the last twelve hours never happened.

I don't push. I've been on the other end of being pushed, questions landing like accusations when all a person actually needs is time, so instead I finish my coffee, help the twins into their coats, and let Rafe walk us down to the truck he's somehow already got running and scraped clear of snow.

"Roads are open as far as the highway," he says, holding the door for Josie like it's any other morning. "Should be an easy drive."

"Thank you. For everything." I mean it as more than politeness and I think he hears that, because something flickers across his face before he shuts it down again, quick and practiced.

"Anytime." One word, and he delivers it like the period at the end of a sentence he doesn't want to keep writing.

I load the twins in, and on my way back through the taproom to grab the bag I left by the office door, I stop at his desk with an idea that's been forming since somewhere around the second cup of coffee. There's a paper cup on the counter, empty, left over from yesterday's rush before the storm hit. I fill it from the machine, black, the way he likes it, and dig a pen out of the bottom of my purse.

Thanks for the rescue. J.

I write it small, on the sleeve, nothing dramatic, nothing that demands an answer. I set the cup square in the middle of his desk where he can't miss it and can't misread it either, a door left open instead of one I'm knocking on, and I leave before I can talk myself into writing something bigger.

The drive out of the brewery lot is slow going, snow banked high on both sides where the plow's been through, and the twins settle into the particular quiet that comes after a big adventure finally runs out of steam. Eli falls asleep against the window somewhere past the second mile marker. Josie stays awake, forehead against the glass, watching the white fields go by like she's cataloguing something.

"Mom."

"Yeah, baby."

"Is Rafe going to be our friend now?"

I glance at her in the rearview mirror, and there's nothing performative in the question, no angle to it, just an eight-year-old asking the thing she actually wants to know in the most direct language available to her. I take a second before I answer, because she deserves a real one and not just whatever's easiest to say at a stop sign.

"I don't know yet, sweetheart."

"Why not? You know everything else."

"I don't, actually. Not even close." I ease through the intersection, checking twice for ice I can't quite see. "Some things you don't get to know in advance. You just have to wait and find out along with everybody else."

"That sounds annoying."

"It really is."

"Do you want him to be our friend?"

That one lands harder than the first, and I don't answer it right away, because I'm honestly not sure I trust my own voice to stay level if I try. Josie doesn't push either, she just watches the snow-covered mailboxes go by, patient in the exact way her brother never quite manages to be.

"I think I do," I say finally. "I'm still figuring out what that means, though."

"That's a very grown-up answer."

"I had a very grown-up night."

"Was it fun?"

"Parts of it," I say, and I catch myself almost smiling at the windshield, the road having nothing to do with it.

Eli stirs awake as we pull up to the school, blinking hard against the glare off the snowbanks, and both kids scramble out with backpacks and half-finished stories about pancakes and generators and a dog the size of a small couch, already turning the whole night into the kind of legend eight-year-olds specialize in building. I watch them cross the lot toward the doors, Josie's hand finding Eli's without either of them seeming to notice they've done it, and something in my chest goes soft and useless the way it always does the second I drop them off, easy morning or hard one.

The drive back toward the brewery takes eleven minutes if the lights cooperate, and today they don't. I catch every single one red, one after another down Main Street, snowplows still working the intersections, and at each one I do the thing I told myself in the shower this morning I absolutely would not do.

I check my phone.

There's nothing waiting for me, no text, no missed call, not even one of those meaningless notifications that usually clutter up my lock screen by this hour. I tell myself it's fine. I tell myself a paper cup and four scrawled words don't obligate anyone to respond within an hour, that Rafe's probably knee deep in storm cleanup, checking on suppliers and generators and whatever else a brewery needs after fourteen inches of snow tries to bury it.