Page 90 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

JENNA

I'm still at the kitchen window when the car door opens.

I've been standing here so long my feet have gone numb against the cold floor, dish towel forgotten somewhere behind me on the counter, eyes locked on that low dark shape parked near the tree line like staring hard enough might make it either move on or disappear entirely. It does neither. It just sits there, engine idling, until the driver's door swings open and a shape unfolds out of it, and my stomach drops straight through the floor because I know that walk. I know it in my sleep. I know it in nightmares I haven't had in years and still remember exactly.

It's Derek.

He's not hurrying, and the calm of it is what scares me most, the unhurried, deliberate pace of a man who has already decided how tonight goes and doesn't need to rush to get there. He crosses the yard like he owns it, like the last six years and every page in the court file on my kitchen counter don't exist, heading straight for my porch with his hands loose at his sides and his shoulders set in a way I catalogued a hundred times a long time ago, right before things got loud.

I don't scream. I don't freeze either, not really, not the way people mean when they say it. Some old, well practiced part of me switches on instead, the part nine years with Derek had trained to read a room half a second before it turned dangerous, and it moves my feet toward the hallway before the rest of me finishes catching up.

"Eli. Josie." I keep my voice low and even, the exact tone we drilled months ago, back when the custody fight first turned ugly enough that Rafe sat all three of us down at this table with a legal pad and a plan I prayed we'd never actually need. "Up. Now. Bathroom, just like we practiced."

Eli's awake before I finish the sentence, some instinct in him already primed for exactly this, already reaching for Josie's hand before I've got the door fully open.

"Is it Dad?"

"Bathroom first. Talk after."

Josie's slower, groggy, blinking against the hallway light, and I scoop her up without breaking stride, her stuffed dog clutched tight against her chest, the one she named after the real Biscuit the week she met him. We move fast down the short hall, all three of us together, her small heart hammering against my collarbone hard enough that I can feel it through two layers of fabric, and I get them both inside the bathroom before the first knock lands on the front door, three hard raps that aren't a knock so much as a demand.

"Lock it behind me," I tell Eli, already backing out into the hall. "You know the rule."

"Not for anyone but you."

"Not for anyone but me. Not even if he says please. Not even if he says something's wrong and he needs you to open up." I crouch down to Josie's height for one second, brushing her hair back from her face, working to keep my voice steady while my own heart slams against my ribs hard enough to hurt. "If someone says the word, it's safe to open. If nobody says the word, you don't move, no matter what you hear. What's the word?"

"Biscuit," she whispers.

"That's my girl." I kiss the top of her head, straighten up, and look at Eli, eight years old and already standing between his sister and the door like he's done this before, because in some smaller version of tonight, he has. "I love you both. Lock it now."

The bolt clicks home the second I pull the door shut behind me, and I stand there for one full breath with my palm flat against the wood, listening to Derek's fist land against the front door hard enough to rattle the frame in its hinges.

"Jenna. I know you're in there. Open the door."

I don't answer. I grab my phone off the kitchen counter on my way past, thumb finding the numbers before I've fully decided to dial them, and dispatch answers before the second ring finishes, a voice calm enough that I borrow a little of it for myself. I give them the address in three clipped sentences, my ex-husband, my kids locked in the bathroom, please hurry, and keep the line open in my pocket as I move, fast and quiet, back toward the front room where I can watch the porch through the gap in the curtains without standing anywhere near the glass myself.

"This is still my family too, whether you like it or not. You don't get to just lock me out like I'm some stranger off the street." His voice climbs with every sentence, none of the careful, reasonable tone from this same driveway this morning left in it, nothing left of the reformed man his lawyer worked so hard to sell the judge on. "Open this door, Jenna. I'm not asking twice."

"I did everything they told me to do. Every class. Every session. Bennett said patience would fix all of this, and instead I'm standing outside my own family's house like I'm the criminal here." Something in his voice cracks wider with every word, less like a man defending himself and more like someone watching the ending he'd already written refuse to cooperate. "Open the door."

He hits the door again, harder, and something in the frame groans in a way that turns my stomach, nine years of knowing exactly what that particular pitch in his voice means rising up cold and familiar under my skin. I'm already reaching for my phone with hands that don't feel entirely like mine when headlights sweep hard across the yard from the opposite direction and a truck I'd know anywhere skids to a stop at an angle that puts it squarely between Derek's rental and my porch.

Rafe's out of the cab before it's finished rocking on its springs, and for one terrible second I think he's going to come in hot, every ounce of that training finally let off the leash and pointed straight at Derek. He doesn't. He walks toward the porch slow and deliberate, calm in a way that somehow reads as more dangerous than if he'd come in running, hands open and visible at his sides, voice pitched low enough that I have to lean toward the window to catch it.

"Derek."

Derek spins around, fist still raised, and for a second neither of them moves.

"This isn't your business, Montgomery."

"It's exactly my business. Step back from the door." Rafe doesn't raise his voice, doesn't need to, that same steady, immovable calm I've watched him use on frightened dogs and furious customers and, once, a very large man threatening to sue over a batch of beer that went flat in his own garage. "You're not getting past me tonight. Not like this."

"I just want to talk to my own kids."

"At midnight. Pounding on a locked door. That's not talking, Derek. That's terrifying two eight-year-olds, and you know it." He takes one more step, close enough now that his shoulder blocks most of Derek's face from where I'm watching, and his voice drops even further, almost gentle, the exact tone I've heard him use talking someone down off a ledge they built for themselves. "I know you're angry. I know tonight feels like it's spinning out from under you. But nothing that happens in the next thirty seconds gets you your kids back. It only makes tonight worse."

"You don't know the first thing about what I've lost."