Page 86 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

"Danny hated waste. Hated it more than almost anything. He'd rather eat a bad meal than throw out food that was still good, drove me crazy about it our whole childhood." She laughs, small and sad around the edges. "You are the best thing that survived him, Rafe. Not the guilt. Not the money you've been sending me for six years like it settles some account. You. And right now you're standing over the one good thing that came out of all of this, deciding it's better to waste it than risk losing it later. He would be furious with you. Actually furious, not the polite kind."

"I don't know how to just stop being scared of it."

"Nobody's asking you to stop being scared. I'm asking you to stop letting scared make your decisions for you." Her voice softens again, steady under the words. "You've spent six years treating survival like a debt you owe somebody. You already paid it, Rafe. Danny forgave you the second it happened, if he ever even blamed you at all, which I don't think he did. The only person still sending you the bill is you."

I don't have a real answer for that, just static, so I sit with it instead, phone pressed to my ear, Biscuit's weight warm against my leg.

"I should let you go," Marisol says eventually, gentle. "Just promise me you'll think about what I said instead of filing it away with everything else you don't look at."

"I promise."

"Good. Mateo says hi, by the way. He drew you something. I'll mail it, and you'll pretend you don't cry a little when it shows up, and I won't call you on it."

"Deal."

She hangs up, and the brewhouse goes quiet again, quieter than before somehow, her words still settling into something in me that hasn't finished shifting yet.

I'm still sitting on the floor an hour later when the side door bangs open hard enough to rattle the hinges, and Gunny walks in already talking, keys still in his hand, jacket half off one shoulder.

"You didn't answer your phone. Three times."

"I was on with Marisol."

"Good, because I've got things to say and I'd rather only say them once." He drops his jacket over a stool and crosses the room, close enough that I have to actually look up at him, Biscuit lifting his head off my lap just long enough to register the new arrival before deciding Gunny's not worth moving for. "You want to explain to me why half this town keeps stopping me on the street to ask if you're all right, and I don't have a single decent answer for any of them?"

"It's not a pattern."

"It is exactly a pattern, and you know it, because I've watched you run it twice before and now I'm watching you run it a third time in slow motion, like maybe if you do it carefully enough this time it won't count." He crouches down so we're closer to level, and there's none of the usual joke waiting behind his eyes tonight. "Talk to me. For real this time. Not the version where you tell me you're fine and I pretend to believe it so we can both go home."

"I don't know what you want me to say."

"Stop performing and say the actual thing. Not the speech about variables. Not the one about protecting people. The real one, underneath all of it." He doesn't move, doesn't blink, just waits, the same patient, immovable weight he's brought to every hard conversation we've had in six years of knowing each other. "What are you actually scared of, Rafe?"

"I told you. I'm scared of being the thing that goes wrong for them."

"That's the story. I asked for the truth." His voice doesn't rise, but it doesn't need to, cutting cleaner than shouting ever could. "You've handled real threats your whole life. Derek. Combat. A courtroom full of people trying to prove you're unstable. None of that broke you. You didn't run from any of it. So it's not Derek keeping you up at night, and it's not the judge. What is it?"

I open my mouth to give him the same answer again, the responsible one, the one that's held up in every version of this argument I've had with myself for two weeks straight, and it just doesn't come. Whatever's been locked down in me since the hearing finally gives way, all at once, no warning before it happens.

"I'm scared of getting it," I say, my voice cracking in a way I don't recognize. "All of it. Jenna, the twins, the whole life I never let myself plan for. I'm scared of actually having it, actually keeping it long enough to build something real, and then losing it anyway, the same way I lost Danny. I didn't see that coming either. I had him, and then I didn't, in about four seconds, and I've spent six years making sure I never stood close enough to anything to lose it that fast again."

Gunny doesn't say anything for a second, just lets it sit in the room the way Marisol let my silence sit on the phone, giving it the weight it's earned instead of rushing to patch it over.

"There it is," he says finally, quiet now. "That's the actual thing."

"Saying it doesn't fix it."

"No. But you've been carrying it alone for six years, and it just got a little lighter the second you said it out loud in front of somebody who isn't going anywhere." He straightens up, offers me a hand, and pulls me to my feet with more force than I'm expecting, like he's trying to physically yank me out of the last two weeks. "You can't protect yourself from losing people by refusing to have them in the first place, Rafe. That's not safety. That's just losing them slower, on purpose, so it doesn't catch you off guard."

"When did you get so good at this?"

"I've had a lot of practice watching you almost ruin your own life. Consider it professional development." The joke's back in his voice now, but there's something steadier underneath it, real relief, like he's been hoping for weeks that I'd finally say it. "So what are you going to do about it?"

I look down at Biscuit, who's already lost interest in both of us and gone back to sleep against the tank, and then at the legal pad still closed on the desk, no list started, no column of problems waiting to be solved with a pen. For two weeks I've been running the same threat assessment on my own life, cataloging every way it could go wrong, treating Jenna and the twins like a risk to be managed instead of a family to be lived in. It's the wrong question. It's been the wrong question since the day I met her.

I grab my truck keys off the peg by the door.

"Rafe."