Page 24 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

"That's it? Just 'let me know'?"

"Is there something else?" He finally looks at me, and for one second something flickers underneath the careful blankness, gone before I can be sure I saw it at all.

"No. Nothing else." I take the folder back once it's signed, and the silence that follows isn't the comfortable kind we used to have. It's the kind that costs something to sit inside of, and we're both pretending not to notice the price.

Maddening is the word I keep landing on. At night, when I'm supposed to be sleeping, I replay the weight of his hand around mine and wonder why a man who drove out to fix my woodstove without being asked twice can't manage two full sentences about anything that actually matters now.

Gunny's picked up on it too, in the way Gunny notices everything and says nothing directly about it, just enough sideways comments to prove he's paying close attention. "You two are being very professional lately," he tells me one afternoon, setting a stack of invoices on my desk with the air of a man delivering evidence. "Real formal. Real polite. It's like watching two people try to defuse a bomb by being extremely courteous to it."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Sure you don't." He says it exactly the way he says everything, cheerful and entirely unconvinced, and leaves before I can decide whether to argue with him.

I don't push it. I tell myself that's restraint. Some nights I'm not entirely convinced it's not just fear wearing a more respectable coat.

The twins, at least, haven't caught on to the strangeness. They still charge into the taproom after school like they own the place, still narrate their day to Rafe in exhaustive detail whether he asks for it or not, still treat the careful distance between their mother and their favorite grumpy brewmaster as background noise that doesn't concern them. I envy them that. I used to be able to want things that simply, before I learned what it costs to be wrong about a person.

It's a quiet evening at the cabin, the kind where the twins have homework spread across the kitchen table and I'm catching up on my own laptop at the counter, when the new-mail chime goes off, small and ordinary, the same sound it makes fifty times a day for nothing in particular.

This time it isn't nothing.

The sender's a law office I don't recognize, a name with too many syllables and a city three states behind me, and my stomach drops through the floor before I've even clicked it open, some animal part of me already bracing before my conscious mind catches up to why.

"Mom, is nine times seven fifty-six or sixty-three?" Eli asks, not looking up from his worksheet.

"Sixty-three," I say, on autopilot, my eyes already on the screen.

I open the email with a hand that isn't quite steady, and there it is, black text on a white background, the kind of ordinary formatting that has no business carrying this much weight.

RE: Walsh, Support Review.

I read the subject line four times before any of the words underneath it start to register as actual sentences, and even then they blur together into something I have to read twice more before it lands. It's a review. It's a hearing. It's a door I thought I'd locked behind me eight states ago, cracking back open like it was never really shut at all.

Josie's humming something to herself over her spelling list, off-key and unbothered, and Eli's already moved on to the next problem, chewing his pencil with the particular focus he gets when a number refuses to cooperate. Neither of them has any idea that three feet away, their mother is staring at a subject line that just turned a fresh start into something far less resolved than she'd let herself hope.

I close the laptop halfway, not enough to hide it, just enough to buy myself a few seconds of not looking directly at it, and I sit there with my heart going too fast in a kitchen that still smells like dinner, listening to my kids do homework like the world hasn't just tilted slightly on its axis behind their backs.

I think about calling Maggie. I think about calling no one and just sitting with it until it stops feeling so tight in my chest. Neither one solves the actual problem, which is that some lawyer three states away has decided this is the season to reopen a door I spent a year convincing myself was shut for good.

It was never going to stay this simple. I think I always knew that. I just didn't expect it to come looking for me on an ordinary evening, in an email with a subject line I'll be reading in my sleep for weeks, while my children argue quietly over whether fifty-six was ever really a reasonable guess.

12

RAFE

The forecast says six inches, maybe eight, and I've learned not to trust a mountain forecast further than I can see out the window. By early afternoon the sky over the ridge has gone heavy and gray-green, swollen with snow, and the wind's already carrying enough bite that I send Gunny out to double-check the propane tanks are strapped down before the first flake even hits the ground.

"You're doing the thing," Gunny says, watching me walk the taproom with a checklist in one hand and a roll of duct tape in the other.

"What thing?"

"The thing where a little weather turns you into a man securing a forward operating base." He nods at the tape. "It's snow, Rafe. Not an invasion."

"Six inches of snow closes roads. Closed roads strand people. I'd rather have tape I don't need than a door that won't shut."

"Sure." He says it the way he says everything, easy and unbothered, and goes to check the tanks anyway.

By two the flakes are coming down sideways, thick enough that the ridge disappears behind a wall of white, and by three the six inches the forecast promised already looks like a lowball. I've seen storms roll in fast before. I haven't seen one roll in this fast, not since I've been back, and something in the pace of it puts me on a low simmer of alert I don't bother arguing myself out of.