Page 100 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

"You know it's official now," I tell him. "Signed this morning. You're stuck with me on paper too, not just in practice."

He stops fighting the tie and turns to consider the question with the same gravity he gives every serious matter. "Does that mean I get your last name if I want it?"

"If you want it. No pressure either way."

"I want it." He says it simply, no hesitation at all, and goes back to the bow tie like he hasn't just handed me something I'll be thinking about all through the ceremony. "Josie wants it too. She just likes making people ask twice."

Once I finally get out to the brewery, Dot's already running the whole operation like a woman who's commanded worse battles than a string of lights that won't cooperate.

"Ladder. Now. Third strand from the left keeps flickering, and I will not have flickering lights in my photographs." She points at me without looking up from the tangle in her hands, and I go get the ladder, because arguing with Dot on a normal day is a losing proposition, and today isn't a normal day.

Gunny meets me halfway up, already dressed, already looking somehow both entirely at ease and completely out of his depth in a suit that fits him better than I've ever seen him allow.

"You've gone pale. Is that normal?"

"I look composed."

"You look like a man arguing with his own stomach and losing." He claps me on the shoulder, hard enough to nearly take the ladder out from under me. "Relax. I've got the music queued, I've got the vows backed up on two separate phones in case one dies, and I've personally confirmed Eli has the rings zipped into a pocket he can't accidentally unzip. Best man and DJ. I'm doing double duty and somehow still doing it better than you're managing just standing there."

"I appreciate the confidence."

"Don't get used to it. I'm charging you for the DJ half."

"What's the playlist looking like?"

"Classified. You'll hear it when everybody else does." He starts back down the ladder, then pauses halfway, serious for one rare unguarded second. "Danny would've stood up there with me today, you know. Best man duties split two ways instead of me hogging the whole job."

"I know."

"Just wanted it said once before the day gets away from us." He finishes the climb down and claps my shoulder again, gentler this time. "Go find your fiancée. Make sure she hasn't changed her mind in the last twenty minutes."

Maggie's arranging trays of something involving considerably more sugar than the bakery down the street would ever admit to making, and she catches my eye across the tent with the particular look of a woman who has personally witnessed every ugly stretch of the last two years and still shows up smiling on the good days.

"You clean up decent, Montgomery."

"High praise, coming from the woman who's seen me at my absolute worst."

"Don't let it go to your head. Jenna did all the actual work getting you here." She sets down the last tray and nods toward the gravel lot, where a rental car I don't recognize is pulling in slow, uncertain, like the driver isn't quite sure this is the right address. "You've got company."

Marisol gets out first, dressed sharp enough that I barely recognize her out of her usual work clothes, and Mateo climbs out after her already scanning the crowd for Eli and Josie, who spot him at the exact same second and abandon whatever job Dot had assigned them to come sprinting across the grass.

"You made it."

"Wouldn't have missed it." She hugs me quick, fierce, the kind of hug that carries more than it says out loud. "Danny would've had a lot to say about you in a suit."

"None of it complimentary, probably."

"Absolutely none of it." She laughs, and it eases something in her face I don't often get to see loosen all the way. "He'd have loved this, though. All of it. He always said you'd end up alone in that brewhouse growing old and stubborn if somebody didn't drag you out of it eventually."

"Turns out somebody did."

She glances toward the house, where Jenna's somewhere getting the last pieces put together, and something in her expression goes soft and a little distant. "To Danny," she says, raising the glass someone's already pressed into her hand, and the small knot of us standing near the gravel falls quiet together, less grief now than room being made for him at a table he'd have been loud and delighted to sit at. "For getting this stubborn man to finally build something worth showing up for."

I don't trust my voice enough to answer that one out loud. I just raise my own glass, and Marisol nods like that's answer enough, and the moment passes gentle instead of heavy, a gift I didn't know how badly I needed until she gave it to me.

Mateo's already tangled up with Eli and Josie by the taproom door, the three of them arguing over some game with rules only children that age ever fully agree on, and he breaks off long enough to shake my hand with the serious formality of a ten-year-old who's decided today calls for it.

"Congratulations, Mr. Montgomery."