Page 60 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

"Not work. Older than work." I turn my cup once in my hands, watching steam rise off it into the cold. "It's something I should have dealt with a long time ago and kept finding reasons not to. I'm out of reasons."

"You don't have to tell me more than that if you're not ready."

"I know." And that's the strange part, something about myself I still don't fully understand. She's not pushing, and I'm grateful for it, even while some contradictory corner of me wishes she would, wishes she'd ask the follow-up question and back me into finally saying the whole thing out loud. "I'll tell you everything. Just not tonight."

"Then not tonight." She says it easily, no weight added to it, and reaches over to steal a sip of my cider like the conversation's already settled itself. "For what it's worth, I trust you enough not to need the whole file right now."

"That's more trust than I've earned on this particular one."

"That's for me to decide, not you." She smiles at me over the rim of the cup, and something in my chest loosens a little, even though nothing's actually been resolved. Trust like that isn't easy to argue with. It just makes me want to earn it.

Eli skids to a stop in front of me before I can answer, Josie catching up a beat later, both of them buzzing with the particular chaos of kids who've been allowed sugar and sparklers on the same night.

"Gunny says the fireworks come from the fairgrounds and they shoot straight up over the square," Eli reports, breathless. "He says last year one went sideways and hit Dot's tent."

"That's not confirmed," I say. "That's a rumor Dot's been trying to kill for a year."

"Gunny says it's confirmed."

"Gunny also says a lot of things." I ruffle his hair, snow-damp and smelling like woodsmoke, and something about the easy weight of the gesture, how automatic it's gotten, catches me for half a second before I let it go. "Go find him. Tell him I said no more sparklers within twenty feet of the cider stand. Dot will have my head."

They tear off toward the bonfire again, and Jenna watches them go with the soft, worn expression she wears most when she's not trying to perform anything for anyone.

"You're good with them," she says. "I don't think I tell you that enough."

"They make it easy."

"They don't, actually. Eli argues every instruction you give him on principle and Josie's been informally cataloguing your flaws since the leaves turned. That's not easy. That's you being patient with two kids who test everyone who walks into their life, and you passing every single time without seeming to notice you're being tested." She says it plainly, not fishing for anything, just handing me the observation the way she'd hand me a tool she thinks I need. "I notice, even if you don't."

I don't have a ready answer for that, so I settle for wrapping my arm around her shoulders and drawing her in against me instead, and she leans into it without missing a beat, fitting there like the space was built to her exact size. The bonfire cracks and throws sparks up into the dark, and somewhere behind us Gunny's arguing with Dot about whether the countdown clock counts as false advertising, and the air around us smells like woodsmoke and cider and cold, and for a few minutes I let myself just stand in it without running the numbers on what's coming in three days.

It doesn't last. It never does lately, not since I bought the ticket, not since I started keeping a mental list of everything I'll need to say once I'm standing in front of her, the list I've rewritten a dozen times because every version sounds wrong the second I say it out loud to an empty room. Marisol deserves better than a version that sounds wrong. She's waited six years for whatever version I finally bring her, and I owe her the one that's actually true, not the one that's easiest for me to get through.

"There you are." Maggie appears with a tray of something involving marshmallows, cutting straight through the thought before it can finish forming. "Gunny's telling Josie the fireworks story again. The sideways one. I give it ninety seconds before somebody official has to intervene."

"I already told Eli it's not confirmed."

"It's extremely confirmed. I was there. Dot's tent flap still has the scorch mark." Maggie grins, unrepentant, and holds out the tray. "Eat something. You've got the face of a man who forgot dinner exists."

"I had dinner."

"You had half a sandwich standing up at the brewery at four o'clock, which does not count, and Jenna already told me that, so don't bother arguing the point." She winks at Jenna, who doesn't even try to hide her laugh, and disappears back toward the fire with her tray, leaving the two of us alone again in the small pocket of quiet she'd interrupted.

"She's not wrong about the sandwich," Jenna says.

"She's rarely wrong about anything. It's genuinely unsettling."

Jenna drifts off toward the twins a few minutes later, called away by an argument over whose sparkler burned out first, and Gunny takes the opening the second she's out of earshot, sliding into the space she left with a mug of his own and an expression I recognize as trouble.

"You look like you're chewing on something you don't want to swallow," he says.

"I'm fine."

"You said that the same way six years ago, right before you signed the papers and didn't tell anyone until it was already done." He doesn't say it unkindly, just states it, flat and true and impossible to argue with. "Tell me it's not the fund."

"The fund's only part of it this time." I keep my eyes on the fire, on the twins arguing about sparkler physics twenty feet away, on anything that isn't Gunny's face reading mine like a manifest. "I'm flying out to see her. In person. Finally."

"About time." He says it quiet, no judgment in it, just relief worn smooth from years of waiting to hear it. "You tell Jenna?"