9. Jenna
JENNA
Ifollow him through the office door before I've fully decided to, the way you move toward someone before you've thought it through.
He doesn't turn around right away. His shoulders are still set wrong, too high, too stiff, and his hands are flat on the desk like he's holding it down instead of the other way around.
I don't ask what happened.
I learned a long time ago not to push somebody for answers while they're still falling apart.
Questions in that moment don't feel like concern.
They feel like one more thing to manage.
So I close the door quietly behind me, pull the second chair away from the wall, and sit down across from him instead.
I don't reach for him. I don't fill the space with words that would only be there to make me feel less useless.
I just sit, let the silence be enough, and wait to see if he wants company or just someone in the room.
The office is small enough that I can hear him breathing, slow and deliberate, the kind of breath somebody counts on purpose.
Josie's drawing watches us both from the corkboard, one crooked corner still curling away from its thumbtack.
Outside the door, faint through the wall, I can hear Gunny keeping the twins occupied with something that involves a lot of dramatic sound effects, and I'm grateful for him in a way I don't have the words for yet.
The quiet stretches longer than any silence I've sat through with another adult in years, and I make myself stay inside it instead of reaching for something to fill it with.
I've been on the other side of this exact moment before, the one where somebody's world tips sideways and every well-meaning question just makes the tipping worse.
I know what it costs a person to be watched while they put themselves back together.
I keep my hands folded in my lap and let him set the pace.
Rafe doesn't sit. He stays standing at the desk for a long time, long enough that I start to wonder if he wants me gone, and then, without turning around, he starts to talk.
"Loud noises." His voice comes out low, rough at the edges, like each word costs him something to produce. "Sudden ones. Sharp ones. They take me somewhere I can't always get back from fast."
"Okay."
"That's it. That's the whole mechanism. Something goes off, and for a while I'm not here anymore.
" He finally turns, and his face has none of its usual careful blankness, just something raw underneath it that he's clearly not used to anyone seeing.
"I don't always come back fast. Sometimes it's seconds. Sometimes it's longer."
"How long was it today?"
"Under a minute." He says it like a confession. "Felt like an hour."
"Does it happen a lot?"
"Less than it used to. More than I let on." He says it flatly, like a fact he's stopped being ashamed of reporting. "A car backfiring. A door slamming somewhere I don't expect it. Sometimes nothing at all, and I still end up somewhere I didn't ask to go."
"That sounds like carrying a second job nobody else can see."
"It's just a normal day for me at this point." He catches himself the second it's out, something almost like a wince crossing his face, and I get the sense that's not a joke he makes out loud very often, if ever.
I don't ask him what he saw in that minute, or where exactly it took him, because I can tell by the careful way he's rationing his own words that specifics aren't something he's ready to hand over yet, maybe not to me, maybe not to anyone.
I let the door on that stay shut and wait for whatever he actually wants to say next.
"I hate that they saw it." He drags a hand down his face, over stubble he clearly didn't get to this morning. "My employee's kids. Watching me come apart on the floor like that."
"They're not your employee's kids."
He blinks at me, thrown for half a second. "That's what I said."
"You said it like they belong to you somehow.
Like it's your job to protect them from ever seeing anything hard.
" I keep my voice gentle, because this isn't a correction meant to wound, just one meant to land true.
"They're not your anything, Rafe. They're just kids who like you. That's all it has to be."
Something moves across his face, fast, gone almost before I catch it, an expression I don't have a name for yet, somewhere between relief and something that looks almost like grief.
He doesn't argue the point. He just looks at me like I've handed him something he didn't know he needed and isn't sure how to hold.
"They weren't scared of me." He says it slow, like he's still working out whether he believes it. "Josie brought me water. Eli stood guard at the door."
"That sounds like them."
"It undid me more than the actual thing did." He drops into the chair across from mine, finally, elbows on his knees, hands loosely clasped like he's trying to keep them still without making it obvious. "I don't know what to do with that."
"You don't have to do anything with it. You can just let it have happened."
He holds my gaze for a long moment, and something in how he's looking at me changes, less guarded than I've ever seen it. I feel the pull of it more than I expect to, and I have to remind myself that this isn't the moment to want anything for myself.
"I flinch at things too," I say, before I can talk myself out of it. "Not the same thing. Not even close. But I know what it's like to have your body remember something before your mind catches up."
"What things?"
I take a breath, because this is a door I don't open for just anyone, and I'm aware, even as I start talking, that I'm choosing to open it for him.
"Derek used to raise his voice as a weapon.
Not randomly. Not because he lost control.
" I keep my hands still in my lap, deliberate, the way I've trained myself to stay steady when I say his name out loud.
"He'd pick the exact moment it would do the most damage, and then he'd get loud, precise about it, like he'd rehearsed the whole thing.
It wasn't about being angry. It was about making sure I knew who was in charge of the room. "
Rafe doesn't say anything. He just watches me with a stillness that feels less like waiting and more like listening with his whole body.
"I still flinch at slammed car doors sometimes.
In parking lots, at the grocery store, wherever.
Some part of my brain hears that sound and goes on alert before the rest of me remembers it's just a car door and nothing's actually wrong.
" I shrug, a small, tired movement. "It's not the same wound as yours.
I know that. But I think it might be the same species of scar. "
"How long were you married to him?"
"Nine years. Together for two before that.
" I say the numbers plainly, the way I've learned to say them, stripped of the weight they used to carry.
"It took me most of those nine years to understand that the version of normal I was living in wasn't actually normal.
You get so used to bracing that you forget there's a version of a room where nobody's keeping score of who flinched first."
"How'd you finally see it?"
"The twins started flinching too. That did it faster than anything he ever said to me directly." My throat tightens on that one, even now, even this far removed from it. "I could absorb a lot on my own behalf. I couldn't watch it land on them."
He's quiet for long enough that I start to worry I've said too much, handed him something he didn't ask for and doesn't know what to do with. Then he speaks, and his voice has dropped even lower, rougher.
"That's the first true thing anyone's said to me in years."
"That's a low bar."
"Maybe. Doesn't make it less true." He leans forward slightly, elbows still on his knees, close enough now that I can see the exact shade of his eyes in the flat overhead light, close enough that the air between us has gone thick and different, charged with something neither of us is naming out loud. "Jenna."
"Yeah."
"I don't know how to do this part."
"Which part?"
"The part where somebody actually sees you and you don't immediately want to leave the room."
I don't have an answer ready for that, and for one suspended second neither of us moves, the space between our chairs somehow smaller than it was a minute ago, near enough that I think, with a kind of certainty that surprises me, that he might actually close the rest of the distance himself.
The door bangs open so hard it hits the wall.
"Rafe, I need you." Gunny's already talking before he's fully through the doorway, phone pressed to his chest like he's smothering it.
"Banner company's on the line, and they're saying the rush fee doesn't guarantee delivery before the festival opens unless we confirm the second design change in the next ten minutes, and I don't know enough about fonts to make this decision without getting fired. "
The moment scatters like a flock of birds startled off a wire, gone in every direction at once, and Rafe straightens so fast it's like the last several minutes never happened at all, shoulders squaring back into their usual careful lines.
"Tell them we'll take the original design.
No changes." He's already standing, already halfway back to the man who runs checklists and counts hop shipments twice, and it should feel like nothing happened here at all.
It doesn't, though, not to me, not with the way he pauses at the door and looks back at me for one more second before he goes.
It's not an apology. It's not an explanation either. It's a promise, plain as anything, that whatever almost happened in this office isn't finished, just interrupted, and he intends to come back for it the first chance he gets.
Then he's gone, already barking questions about font sizes down the hallway, and I sit alone in the small quiet office with Josie's crooked drawing watching me from the corkboard, trying to remember how to breathe normally again myself.
I stay in the chair longer than I need to, listening to Gunny's voice rise and fall through the wall, listening to Rafe's steadier one cut in underneath it, both of them wrestling a font decision like it's a hostage negotiation.
My own pulse hasn't caught up yet. Some part of me is still sitting three feet closer to him than I was ten minutes ago, still feeling the exact moment everything between us shifted into something neither of us said out loud.
I told him about Derek. I haven't told anyone that particular version of it, not even Maggie, not in those exact words, and I don't know yet whether I regret handing it to him so easily or whether it's the first honest thing I've done since I crossed the state line.
Maybe it's both. Maybe that's just what happens when two people who've spent years flinching finally stop, in the same room, at the same time.
I get up eventually, smooth my shirt, and go find the twins, because that's the job I actually came here to do today, paperwork and payroll and two kids who need feeding before too much longer.
But some part of me stays behind in that office, in the exact second before Gunny burst through the door, wondering what would have happened if he hadn't.