Page 6 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

"Do you know how far behind that puts you?"

"I know it's bad. I didn't know the exact math." He says it without flinching, which I have to respect. Most people get defensive when you point at the wreckage. He just nods like I've confirmed something he already suspected and moves on. "Can you fix it?"

"I can fix it. It's going to take a few weeks to get current, and you're going to owe me an apology on behalf of whoever let it get this bad."

"That was me."

"Then you owe yourself an apology too. I'll wait."

That gets the almost-smile, the one that shows up and vanishes before it commits to anything, and he pushes off the doorframe. "The twins get to school all right?"

"Eli cried for exactly ninety seconds and then discovered there's a kid in his class who also thinks sharks are the superior animal. Josie told her teacher she used to live somewhere else and isn't going to talk about it. So. About what I expected, more or less."

"Sounds like they'll be fine."

"They usually are. It's me who takes longer to catch up."

He doesn't ask what that means, and I don't offer, the same quiet truce we settled into during the interview, both of us leaving certain things alone. He heads back out to the brewhouse, and I turn back to the shoebox with the specific, stupid happiness of someone who has finally found a mess that belongs entirely to her.

I'm three invoices deep when Gunny walks in holding a wooden paddle with four small glasses of beer lined up on it like he's serving a science experiment.

"Professional development," he announces, setting it down next to the keyboard before I can object.

"It's ten in the morning."

"It's a brewery. Ten in the morning is basically noon somewhere, and you can't manage inventory for a beer you've never tasted. That one's the pale ale, that one's the stout, that one's the seasonal nobody can pronounce, and that one's Rafe's fault entirely, he calls it Ridgeline Red and refuses to explain the name."

I take the smallest sip of the pale ale, mostly to be polite, and it's genuinely good, bright and a little citrusy, nothing like the flat stuff I remember from every dive bar of my twenties. The stout is heavier, almost like coffee, and the seasonal one tastes faintly of peaches and something I can't place, which explains nothing about why it's apparently unpronounceable. "That's not bad. Any of it."

"He's better at this than he is at literally anything involving other humans." Gunny crosses his arms and settles his weight against the wall, the posture of a man who intends to stay a while. "Which, side note, is a fascinating quality in a single thirty-nine-year-old man who owns his own business and has functioning knees."

"Is there a spreadsheet question buried in here somewhere?"

"Not even close to one. Purely an observational point. He hasn't dated anyone in this town in six years. Not one person. There was a woman from the feed store who tried for about a month and gave up when he answered a dinner invitation with a text that just said busy."

"Maybe he was busy."

"He's always busy. That's not new information. What's new is that a woman moved to town yesterday and he's already rearranged a weed on his desk twice that I've personally witnessed." Gunny grins at me like he's just laid down a winning hand. "I'm not saying anything. I'm just saying I have eyes."

"I'm going to go ahead and not respond to any of that."

"That's a very diplomatic non-answer. I respect it." He scoops the paddle back up, leaving the pale ale glass behind because I haven't finished it, and pauses at the door. "For what it's worth, the mess in that shoebox has been driving him crazy for months. You fixing it is doing him a genuine favor, whatever else is or isn't going on."

"Nothing else is going on."

"Sure." He says it exactly the way he said it to Rafe yesterday, apparently, if the story that's already made it around the entire building is accurate, and disappears back toward the taproom whistling something with too much confidence in it for ten in the morning.

By noon I've made a dent in the shoebox big enough to see the desk underneath it, and I walk into town for lunch mostly to put actual distance between myself and a building that seems determined to talk about my personal life without my permission. The Busy Bean sits on the corner across from the hardware store, a squat brick building with steam fogging up the front windows and a chalkboard sign out front that says TODAY'S SOUP: WHATEVER MAGGIE FELT LIKE.

The woman behind the counter has silver hair pulled back in a scarf and the kind of eyes that clock everything about you before you've finished ordering. "You're the new one at Ridgeline."

"Word travels fast in this town."

"Word travels at the speed of sound in this town, and I own the place people say it in." She pours my coffee without asking how I take it and gets it right anyway. "Maggie Chen. Sit down, I'm not letting you eat standing up on your second day."

I sit. She studies me across the counter with the frank, unhurried attention of someone taking inventory, and whatever she's looking for, she apparently finds within the length of time it takes to plate a sandwich.

"You're all right," she says finally, like she's ruling on a court case. "You want the real map of this town, or the postcard version?"