Page 50 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

"That's generous."

"It's true. Those aren't always the same thing, but this time they are." I turn my own mug slowly on the table, working up to something I've been circling for longer than last night. "I want to tell you something too. Not because you told me your worst night and now I owe you mine. Because I want you to have it."

He goes still in the particular way he does when he's bracing for something, careful in a way that used to make me nervous and now just makes me want to reach across the table and hold his hand until the bracing stops.

"You don't have to," he says.

"I know I don't. I want to." I take a breath, and the story sits right there where it always sits, close enough to the surface that it never really needed excavating, just permission. "You know the general shape of it. Derek, the divorce, moving eight states to get away from him. You don't know the actual night I decided to leave."

"Tell me."

"He came home furious about something that had nothing to do with me, a job thing, I don't even remember the specifics anymore, and by the time he walked through the door he'd already decided I was going to be the one who paid for it. That was the pattern. It didn't matter what actually went wrong, only that something always had, and he needed somewhere to put the blame." I keep my voice level, the way I've practiced keeping it level for years now, a skill I never wanted and can't seem to unlearn. "He didn't hit me. I want to be clear about that, because people hear this story and assume, and it matters to me that you know exactly what happened and not some worse version your imagination fills in."

"Okay."

"He broke a plate against the wall about a foot from my head. Screamed at me for twenty minutes straight, backed me into the kitchen corner so I couldn't get past him, told me I was worthless and stupid and lucky he put up with me at all, the kind of thing that sounds almost silly repeated out loud in daylight and felt like the entire world collapsing in the actual moment." My hands have gone still on the mug, and I make myself keep talking anyway, because stopping now would mean not finishing, and I've decided he gets the whole thing. "The twins were four. They were supposed to be asleep. Eli wasn't. He came to the top of the stairs in his pajamas because he heard the plate break, and I saw his face over Derek's shoulder, and it was the single most frightened I have ever seen a child look in my life."

"Jenna."

"I got Derek to look away from me long enough to get Eli back to bed, told him it was nothing, a dish slipped, go back to sleep, and he believed me because he was four and wanted to. And I stood in that hallway afterward and knew the next time might not be a plate against a wall. I had exactly one job that mattered: making sure my son never saw that face on me again, and my daughter never learned to expect it." I finally look up at him. "I packed a bag three days later, while Derek was at work, and I didn't stop driving until I ran out of gas and courage at roughly the same mile marker, which happened to be about eight states from where I started."

Rafe doesn't say anything for a long moment, just reaches across the table and takes my hand, turning it over slowly, thumb tracing lines over my knuckles like he's trying to memorize proof that I made it out.

"He never touched you," he says finally, "and it still took everything you had to leave."

"That's the truth of it. That's the part people don't understand. Nobody has to lay a hand on you to make you afraid of your own house." I squeeze his fingers once. "I used to think I should have left sooner, before it got that bad, and some days I still think that. But I left the second I understood what staying would cost the twins, and that's the part I've stopped apologizing for."

"You shouldn't apologize for any of it."

"I'm working on that." I manage something close to a real smile. "Neither of our stories fixes the other one. I know that. Yours doesn't undo mine and mine doesn't undo yours."

"No. But it doesn't feel like nothing, either." He looks at our joined hands like he's still working out the math of it. "Feels like something solid, actually, two people who know exactly what the other one's carrying instead of just guessing at the shape of it."

"That's how it feels to me too."

We sit with that for a moment, the kitchen quiet except for the furnace clicking on somewhere under the floor, and I'm about to say something else when the front door bangs open with enough force to rattle the window in its frame.

"Mom! Emergency! Actual emergency, not a fake one!" Eli comes barreling through the kitchen doorway with Josie half a step behind him, both of them still in pajamas, both of them radiating the specific panic of children who have realized, at the worst possible moment, exactly how little time is left before school.

"What kind of emergency?"

"The volcano won't work. It's supposed to erupt and it's not erupting, it's just sitting there being a mountain, and the science fair is in two hours, and I already told everybody at school it was going to erupt like a real one." Eli's holding a papier-mache cone that's seen better days, baking soda dusted across his hands and the front of his pajama shirt like flour. "Josie mixed the vinegar wrong and now it's ruined."

"I did not mix it wrong. You told me the ratio."

"I told you the wrong ratio because I was doing math in my head and math is hard before breakfast."

"That's not my fault."

"I didn't say it was your fault. I said it happened."

Rafe's already standing before I've fully processed what's happening, crossing the kitchen toward the counter where a genuinely impressive amount of baking soda has settled into a small white dune around a cone-shaped mountain that is, as promised, doing absolutely nothing volcanic.

"Let me see the ratio," he says, and Eli hands over a crumpled worksheet like he's handing off classified intelligence.

"It's supposed to be two tablespoons of soda to half a cup of vinegar, but I think Josie only put in a quarter cup, and then I added more soda on top of the soda that was already in there, so now the math's all wrong and I don't know how much of anything is actually in there anymore."

"Okay. That's fixable." Rafe crouches down to the counter's height, examining the cone with the same focused attention he gives a fermentation tank that's running warm. Twelve hours after the worst night of his year, he's on his knees on my kitchen floor solving an eight-year-old's volcano crisis, and it gets me right in the chest.