Page 83 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

"Say something, Rafe."

"I don't have anything else."

"You have plenty else. You're choosing not to say it." Her voice catches right at the end, just slightly, and it costs her something to keep standing there instead of stepping back inside and shutting the door on all of it. "Five months. Five months of you showing me exactly who you are, and now you're standing on my porch reciting a speech that sounds like it came out of a legal file instead of your own mouth."

"Maybe that's the problem. Maybe I've spent so long being useful to everybody else's file that I don't know how to be anything else."

"That's not an answer. That's a deflection with better posture."

I don't have a rebuttal for that either, mostly because it's true, and standing here failing to argue with the truth feels like the last honest thing I've got left to offer her tonight.

"I should go."

"Of course you should." She lets go of my hand first this time, and the absence of it is colder than the actual air. "Because that's what you do, isn't it? The second something gets real enough to actually cost you something, you retreat. You did it after the kiss, that whole storm, and it took you four days to find your way back to me. And now you're doing it after we won, which somehow might be the worst timing of the two."

"I'm not retreating. I'm being responsible."

"You keep calling it that. It doesn't make it true." Her arms come up, wrapped around herself against a cold that isn't only the weather. "Responsible would be staying and telling me the truth about what's actually scaring you. This is just leaving with better vocabulary."

There's nothing left in me that isn't either a lie or a wound, so I turn instead, boots loud on the porch boards, and start down the steps into a night that's gotten considerably colder in the last ten minutes.

"Rafe."

I stop, one hand on the truck door, and don't turn around, because turning around means seeing her face, and I've already decided I can't survive that twice in one night.

"We should slow down," I say again, like repeating it might make it sound less like the exact thing Gunny warned me not to do an hour ago. I offer nothing else behind it, no explanation that would actually hold up, no version of the truth that isn't dressed in strategy. Just the five words and the sound of my own boots crossing the last few feet of her gravel drive.

I don't look back at the porch light before I pull away. I don't have to. I already know it's still on, burning for a version of tonight that isn't the one I just built. Somewhere behind me, five months of trust come apart in under ten minutes, quiet and total, the way I've always been best at ending things.

41

JENNA

Six weeks ago he told me he loved me across my own kitchen table, a candle burning down to nothing between us, and meant it enough that I still believe it now, somewhere underneath everything that came after. A week ago he stood on my porch and told me we should slow down, offered nothing behind it, and walked out into the cold like he'd already decided I wasn't worth the trouble anymore. I have spent the seven days since turning both versions of him over in my hands, looking for the exact seam where one became the other, and I still haven't found it.

The twins felt it before I said a single word about it. Kids always do. Some old instinct in them clocked the missing truck in the driveway and the missing voice at the door before I'd worked up the nerve to address any of it, and I still don't have a version of events that would hold up to an eight-year-old's cross-examination any better than it held up to mine.

Josie asks about it daily, blunt about it the way she's always been, no patience for the soft evasions I keep trying to build for her.

"Is Rafe coming today?"

"Not today, baby."

"Is he coming tomorrow?"

"I don't know."

"You always know things." She says it like an accusation, not entirely wrong, and goes back to her cereal with the particular offended dignity of someone who has caught an adult failing at her one job. "You knew when the hearing was. You knew what Dad was going to say before he said it. How do you not know if Rafe's coming over?"

"Because that one isn't mine to know. It's his."

She considers this with more seriousness than an eight-year-old should have to spend on it, stirring her cereal into soup, and I watch her decide not to push further only because she's caught something in my face that tells her the answer might cost me more than she's willing to ask for this morning. She still asks again the next day, and again the day after that. Some questions don't go away just because the answer keeps disappointing everyone who asks them.

Eli doesn't ask at all, which is worse. He goes quiet in the specific way he does when he's decided something is his to carry alone, the same closed-door look he wore for two days after the divorce was finalized, before I coaxed it out of him with patience I don't currently have the reserves to spare twice. I find him in his room one evening with a legal pad open on his bed, my old one from the shoebox days, and he snaps it shut the second I knock on the frame.

"What are you working on?"

"Nothing."