Page 7 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

"I feel like I already got the postcard version from Gunny about forty minutes ago."

"Then you want the real one. Dot Higgins runs the salon and knows everything before it happens, which means half of what she tells you is true and the other half is her being three days ahead of the actual event. The mayor's harmless but slow. Don't let him talk you into a committee. The Kowalskis' goat is loose again as of this morning, so watch the church parking lot. And Gunnar Reyes has clearly been building an ark for the woman he just hired, two of everything, matching them up before they've even had a chance to notice they're being matched."

I nearly choke on my coffee. "He's not subtle, is he?"

"He's about as subtle as that goat. But he's not wrong about much, in my experience, even when he's being a menace about it." She wipes down the counter, in no rush, watching me over the rim of her own cup. "Rafe Montgomery's a good man under a lot of scar tissue. That's not me matchmaking. That's just true, and you'll find out either way. Might as well hear it from somebody who isn't going to make a production of it."

"Duly noted. Slightly terrifying, but noted."

"I don't do it any other way. Eat your sandwich."

I walk back to the brewery with the strange, warm sensation of having been adopted by an entire town in under two hours, which is not a feeling I expected to have twice in one lifetime, let alone this fast.

The afternoon turns out to be the best part of the day. Rafe pulls a chair up next to mine at the desk, close enough that I can smell cedar and clean sweat, and starts walking me through the hop schedule with a patience that doesn't match anything Gunny told me to expect. He flips a receipt over and sketches the whole supply chain on the back of it in blunt pencil strokes, hop farm to distributor to brewhouse, dates stacked against each stage like he's planning a convoy route instead of a beer order.

"You're mapping this like a military operation."

"It basically is one. Miss a shipment window and the whole batch schedule shifts. Shift the batch schedule and you miss a delivery date. Miss a delivery date and you lose an account you spent two years building." He taps the pencil against the paper. "Everything's connected to everything. I just keep it on paper so I don't have to keep it all in my head."

"That's oddly reassuring, actually. I thought it was just me who needed everything written down."

"Difference is you write it down because you like order. I write it down because if I don't, I start dreaming about spreadsheets, and that's a worse way to spend a night than most things I could name."

I laugh, and he glances at me sideways like the sound surprised him, like he wasn't expecting to cause it. We work through two more supplier accounts before Gunny sticks his head in to ask about a keg delivery, and somewhere in the last hour the tension I walked in with this morning has quietly gone somewhere else entirely.

Closing time finds me in the taproom with Gunny and two of the servers, a woman named Wren with a nose ring and a laugh like a car alarm, and a lanky college kid named Marcus who apparently owes Gunny money over a bet involving the Kowalskis' goat. I'm laughing hard enough that my ribs hurt, something about Marcus reenacting the exact moment the goat got loose, and I catch a flash of movement through the office window behind the bar.

Rafe's standing just inside the doorway, watching us, one hand braced on the frame. For half a second his whole face has gone soft in a way I haven't seen on him yet, something unguarded in it that makes my laugh catch in my throat.

The moment I look at him directly, he's gone, already retreating toward the tanks, and by the time I've stopped laughing enough to look again, all I can see is his shoulder disappearing behind the nearest mash tun.

I don't know what that was. I have a guess, and it's a ridiculous one for a first day, the kind of thought I would have talked myself out of a few years ago, before I stopped waiting for the timing to make sense.

Gunny catches me staring at the spot where Rafe had been standing and says nothing, which for Gunny is its own kind of loud. I let the whole question drop rather than dig into it, mostly because Wren is now doing her own impression of the goat clearing the fence, complete with sound effects, and because some things are better left exactly where you found them, at least for tonight. I gather my jacket, wave everyone off, and walk out into an evening that smells like woodsmoke and cut grass, already turning over tomorrow's list of invoices in my head like it's the easiest thing in the world to look forward to.

4

RAFE

I'm elbow deep in a valve on Tank Three when I hear it, the particular silence that means Jenna's on the phone and the news isn't good. I don't need to hear her side of the call. I can read it in her shoulders, the way they climb toward her ears and stay there, the way her free hand presses flat against the desk like she's bracing for the floor to move.

I wipe my hands on a rag and walk over anyway, because pretending I didn't notice isn't in my skill set.

Two weeks into having Jenna Walsh in this building, and the place runs different. Invoices get filed within a day of showing up instead of vanishing into a shoebox, my accountant's stopped sending emails with three exclamation points in the subject line, and the office door that used to stay shut most of the day is open more often than not. Somewhere along the way I stopped noticing any of it as strange.

"Everything all right?"

"My sitter just canceled. Twenty minutes' notice." Jenna sets the phone down like it offended her personally. "I have nowhere else to put them, and I know we talked about the kids staying out of the building, and I completely understand if you need me to leave early to sort this out, I just need thirty seconds to figure out a plan."

"They can stay in the office."

She blinks at me like I've spoken a foreign language. "Didn't you say the office was off limits too?"

"I said the tanks, the walk-in, and the loading dock are off limits. The office is your territory. If you can keep them contained to it, we're fine." I say it like I'm laying out terms of engagement, because that's the only tone I trust myself not to let this sound like more than it is. Somewhere upstairs there's a folded piece of scrap paper with a rule on it that says otherwise. Keep some distance, it says, my own rule, and apparently I didn't mean it enough to actually keep. "It's a technicality. I'm allowed technicalities."

"You're allowing a lot of technicalities lately."

"Don't push it."