Page 38 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

"Thanks."

"Didn't you wear that yesterday?"

I open my mouth to answer, and that's exactly the moment Josie, blessed with a merciless internal ledger, looks up from her backpack and squints at me with the particular focus she usually reserves for spelling tests.

"That is the same shirt," Josie announces, to the porch, to the neighborhood, to whatever satellite happens to be passing overhead. "You wore that to dinner last night."

"I have more than one sweater that looks like this."

"You have one sweater that looks like this. I picked it out with you at the store. It has the button that doesn't match the other buttons."

I glance down. She's right, it's the exact button, off-color and stubbornly out of place, the one I've never once bothered to replace. "Laundry's been a whole thing lately."

"You did laundry two days ago. I watched you do it. You made me match socks."

Maggie has to turn fully away from us, shoulders shaking, pretending very hard to be occupied with something extremely important on the porch railing, and I know exactly what she's doing, and how close she is to losing that particular battle.

"It's a very versatile sweater," I say, with as much dignity as I can locate on short notice. "Get your bags. We're going to be late for absolutely nothing in particular."

"You're being weird," Eli says, not unkindly, the same tone he'd use to note that the sky looks like rain. "Is this a secret weird or a regular weird?"

"It's a get-in-the-car weird. Move."

They move, mercifully, twin backpacks and a stray stuffed rabbit and one abandoned juice box gathered up in under a minute, and I use the small window it buys me to grab Maggie by the arm before she can follow them out.

"Not one word," I whisper. "To anyone. Ever."

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to. I could see it forming."

"I was going to say I liked the sweater. That's all I was going to say." Her eyes are bright with something she's working hard to keep off her face. "You look happy, Jenna."

That lands different than the teasing did, quieter, and I don't have a fast answer for it, because she's right, and because hearing it said out loud makes the whole thing feel bigger and more fragile at the same time.

"I am," I say. "I'm also terrified. Both at once."

"That tracks. That's usually how the good ones announce themselves." She squeezes my arm once, gentle, the teasing set aside for a second. "Swear you'll tell me everything eventually."

"Swear you'll keep your mouth shut until I say otherwise."

"Scout's honor. Which means nothing, since I was never a scout, but you get the sentiment." She winks and steps back to wave the twins off from the porch, already reaching for her phone the second my car doors close, and I decide it's better not to speculate about who that call might be to.

The twins settle into the backseat still arguing about the sad movie, and somewhere around the second stop sign they abandon the argument entirely in favor of singing along to whatever's on the radio, off-key and completely unbothered by it, Eli a half beat behind the melody and Josie making up her own words whenever she forgets the real ones. I used to find that kind of noise exhausting on a rough morning. Today I'd pay money to keep it going a little longer.

I do the math again on the drive home, the same math I ran over coffee at Maggie's corner table weeks ago, except the numbers have changed since then and I don't entirely trust myself with the new total. It isn't just a kiss anymore, or a storm-stranded night in a loft, or two people carefully not naming what's happening between them. It's a whole morning that felt permanent before either of us said the word out loud. It's twins in the backseat who've already decided Rafe belongs to them, singing badly and blissfully unaware their mother spent last night falling harder for a man than she has for anyone since before they were born.

That's the part that scares me, if I'm honest about it. It isn't Rafe himself. Rafe drove eleven miles in the dark for a stranger's woodstove and answered an eight-year-old's checklist like his life depended on getting it right, and truthfully, I trust him more than I've trusted anyone in years. It's the falling itself that scares me, the speed of it, the way something this good makes me reach automatically for the version of the story where it goes wrong, because that's the only version I've got real experience with.

I glance in the rearview mirror at both of them, Josie's head tipped back against the seat, mouth wide open on a note nowhere near the right one, Eli drumming both hands against his knees like the dashboard's a snare drum, and I make a decision somewhere around the third stop sign that I don't examine too hard before I commit to it. I'm not telling them yet. Not about last night, not about any of it, not until I'm sure, or as close to sure as anyone ever gets about something this new, because if it falls apart I want it to be my heart that breaks first, not theirs, and I'll take whatever head start on that I can manage to buy myself.

"Mom, you're doing the face," Josie says, catching my eyes in the mirror between verses.

"What face?"

"The thinking-too-hard face. Your eyebrows do a thing."

"I really don't."