Page 3 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

"Probably. I didn't chase it. I was more concerned with the taxes."

I glance at Eli, who has picked up an invoice off the desk and is reading it with total absorption like it might contain state secrets, and at Josie, who has found a rolling office chair and is spinning herself in slow, contented circles.

"I did bookkeeping for a divorce attorney for three years," I say, dragging his attention back before he changes his mind about all of this. "Forty thousand line items, reconciled monthly, and I never once made him ask twice for a number. I can read a spreadsheet. I can read a shoebox, if that's what this job actually requires."

I slide my resume across the desk before he can talk himself out of listening to the rest of it.

He looks at me for a long moment, and I can't tell if he's reading it or just deciding something about me. "Why'd you leave the attorney job?"

"We moved."

"From where?"

"Does it matter?"

Something shifts in his face, like he's just decided not to push on a door that's clearly locked. "No," he says. "It doesn't."

He doesn't ask again. I don't offer anything else, and the silence settles between us like a small, mutual agreement neither of us says out loud.

"I'm bad at math," he says instead, flat, like it's a confession he's made before and hated every time. "I'm worse at people. I need somebody who can do both so I can go back to doing the one thing I'm actually good at."

"Making beer, you mean."

"That's the one."

Josie stops spinning the chair long enough to announce, "My mom's really good at people. She's just bad at parking."

"I heard that," I say.

"It's true, though."

Rafe's mouth does the thing again, the almost-smile that doesn't quite commit, and for a second this stops feeling like an interview and starts feeling like a conversation I might actually want to keep having. He looks down at the resume in his hand for another few seconds, then sets it on top of the shoebox without reading past the first line.

"When can you start?"

"That's it? You're not going to ask me anything else?"

"Do you want me to?"

"No," I say, too fast, and he almost smiles again. "I can start whenever you need me."

"Tomorrow, then." He glances at Eli, still absorbed in the invoice, and at Josie, already climbing down off the chair to inspect a poster on the wall. "Bring snacks next time. For them, I mean. Not for the invoices."

"Noted."

We shake on it, same careful grip as before, and I walk the twins back out through the brewhouse with a job I didn't have when I drove in and can't quite believe I'm leaving with. The late sun is slanting gold through the high windows again, catching the steel tanks, and for one strange, suspended second the whole place looks less like a stranger's building and more like somewhere I could actually belong.

The rental cabin is fifteen minutes outside town, up a gravel road so dark by the time we find it that my headlights are the only light for half a mile in either direction. The twins fall asleep before we're even off the highway, worn down by a day that asked too much of them, and I drive the last stretch in a silence that feels earned rather than lonely.

My phone buzzes on the passenger seat.

I glance at it out of habit, the way you check a stove burner you already know is off, and the number on the screen stops my breath for exactly one beat. It's not saved. I deleted it eight states ago, in a parking lot outside Toledo, with my hands shaking so badly it took three tries to hit confirm. But deleting a number doesn't mean you forget it, and I've had this one memorized since long before I knew better.

I don't answer it. I don't even open it to see what it says.

I turn the phone face-down on the seat beside me and keep both hands on the wheel, keep my eyes on the narrow beam of road ahead, and let the last of the daylight finish draining out of the sky over Pinewood Ridge. Somewhere behind me, Eli mutters something in his sleep about beer and invoices. Somewhere in my chest, a thought surfaces that I'm too tired to argue with.

The scariest-looking man I've met in years is also the first one in a long time who's made me want to stay somewhere.