Page 70 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

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RAFE

Jenna calls before she's even out of the parking lot, and I hear it in her voice before she gets three words out, that particular flatness people use when they're working hard not to sound as rattled as they actually are.

"He was just sitting there," she says. "Watching us. Like he had every right to be there."

"Are you safe right now?"

"We're in the car. Doors locked. He didn't follow us out, didn't say anything, just sat there the whole time drinking his coffee like it was any other morning." A breath, shaky, then steadier. "I don't know why that scared me more than if he'd actually done something."

"Because it was a message." I'm already grabbing my keys off the hook by the office door, already running the shape of the next hour in my head, calm settling over me the way it used to before a mission, methodical instead of frantic. "He wanted you to see him seeing you. That's the whole point of showing up somewhere public and doing nothing. It's control without anything he can be charged for."

"That's a comforting thought."

"It's not meant to be comforting. It's meant to be accurate." I'm in the truck now, engine turning over. "I'm coming to you. We're going to figure out exactly what we do next, together, and none of it happens without you signing off on it first."

I notice something missing on the drive over before I notice much else, the panic that usually shoots straight from my chest to my hands the second a threat registers. It isn't there. My hands are steady on the wheel. My mind's already three steps ahead, cataloguing what I know, what I don't, what Sheriff Cole's actually going to be able to do about a man who sat in a coffee shop and drank a beverage. Six months ago a nail gun put me on my knees behind my own building with my hands shaking too hard to hold a hammer. Today an actual threat to the people I love most in the world walks up and I'm running numbers instead of running blind. I don't know exactly when that changed. I just know it did, somewhere in the stretch of months between one bad night on a ranch road and a stranger's porch in Norfolk and every steady day since. I'll figure out who to thank for that later, because right now Jenna's voice is still shaking faintly under the calm she's trying to hold onto for the twins' sake.

Jenna's at the cabin when I get there, twins parked in front of a show with a bowl of crackers between them, blessedly unaware of anything beyond whatever cartoon's currently holding their attention. Josie glances up long enough to wave at me with a cracker still in her hand, entirely unbothered, and something in my chest eases a fraction just watching her go straight back to the screen without a shred of the fear sitting in her mother's face right now. Whatever this turns into, I want it to stay that way for both of them, ordinary and small and safe enough to be bored by. Jenna meets me at the door, and I pull her in before either of us says anything else, holding on longer than the moment strictly requires because I need it as much as she does.

"Okay," I say, once we're at the kitchen table, notebook open, the same one I use for brewery inventory now covered in a different kind of list entirely. "Let's talk to Cole first. Then we figure out the practical stuff. Then we call Priya and get this on record for the case, because a man showing up uninvited to watch his ex-wife and kids from a corner table doesn't exactly help his changed-man narrative."

"You already thought of that."

"I think of everything. It's a personality flaw people keep telling me is actually useful."

That gets the smallest laugh out of her, tired but real, and I count it as a win before I pick up the phone.

Cole answers on the second ring, unhurried the way he always is, like nothing in this town has ever actually surprised him.

"Rafe. Heard there was some excitement at the Bean this morning."

"Small town."

"Smallest." Something shifts in his voice, professional now instead of easy. "Walk me through it."

I do, plain and complete, and I hear him writing while I talk, the scratch of a pen against paper on the other end of the line.

"Here's where we are legally," he says, once I've finished. "Sitting in a public place isn't a crime. Watching somebody isn't a crime, not on its own, not without a pattern established. I can't arrest a man for drinking coffee, much as I'd probably enjoy it."

"So we do nothing?"

"So you document everything, every single time, and you let me build a file. One incident is unsettling. A pattern is a restraining order I can actually get a judge to sign." Cole's voice stays level, patient with a bluntness that doesn't feel unkind. "I'll swing a patrol car past the cabin and the brewery a few extra times a day. Not enough to spook him into thinking you're scared, just enough that if he tries anything else, somebody official already has eyes on the pattern forming."

"That's it?"

"That's the legal side of it, and I know it feels thin against a man who just rattled your whole household with a cup of coffee and a stare. But thin and real beats satisfying and illegal every time I've watched it play out." Cole lets that sit a beat before he continues. "Which doesn't mean you and I can't have a separate conversation about practical safety, off the record and away from anything Priya actually needs to know about." I can hear the smile in it, small and knowing. "You strike me as a man who's already made three lists in his head since you called."

"Four."

"'Course it's four." He laughs, short and real. "Let's hear them."

We spend the next twenty minutes going through exactly that, Cole tempering every instinct I have toward overcorrection with the calm of a man who's actually done this before. By the time we hang up we've got a plan. Motion lights at both entrances to the cabin, easy and cheap enough to finish by tomorrow, a camera mounted at the brewery's back door where the deliveries come in, reasonable enough that Cole approves it without blinking, and an updated pickup protocol at the school that Jenna's already setting up before Cole even finishes the sentence, so the front office knows exactly who's authorized and who isn't. What I don't get is the perimeter fence I'd started sketching in my head somewhere around minute three of the phone call, and Cole shuts that down without even pretending to consider it.

"You put up a fence like that, you're not protecting her. You're building a story his lawyer gets to tell a judge about the paranoid ex-military boyfriend turning her house into a compound." He says it kindly but firmly, the exact tone I imagine he uses on drunk teenagers and stubborn ranchers alike. "Lights. Cameras. Documentation. That's the whole plan. You don't get to solve this one with plywood and good intentions."

I don't love it. I say so. Jenna reaches over and squeezes my hand under the table, and something in that small, steady gesture does more to settle me than anything Cole's said.