3. Jenna
JENNA
The shoebox is worse in daylight.
I've been staring into it for a solid five minutes, which feels like an appropriate amount of time to mourn something, and I still haven't found where it starts.
There are no dates on the outside, no folders, no rubber bands separating one crisis from the next, just receipts and invoices crammed in on top of each other until the box gained actual structural weight.
Some of them have gone soft at the corners from being pulled out, reconsidered, and shoved back in without ever being dealt with.
I pick it up anyway, and something in my chest does a small, ridiculous flip of joy. This is a problem I can actually fix, not the kind that keeps me up at night, but the kind I can sort by date and put in order with my own two hands. I haven't had one of those in longer than I want to admit.
The accounting software is worse than the shoebox, if that's possible.
I click into it expecting resistance and instead get a login screen that's sat dormant for months, judging by the little timestamp in the corner that Rafe clearly never noticed was there.
A whole quarter's worth of invoices sits somewhere in the dark, unrecorded, unpaid or unbilled.
I can't tell which yet, and probably both.
"Found the mouse, I see." Rafe leans in the doorway, coffee in hand, watching me the way you'd watch someone examine a car after an accident, waiting to see how bad the news is going to be.
"Your software hasn't been touched in months. Since your last office manager stopped showing up, I'm guessing."
"Sounds about right."
"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?"
"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.