11. Jenna
JENNA
I've done the math three separate times this week, and it keeps landing on the same uncomfortable number.
It isn't about me. I survived Derek. I survived a twenty-six-foot U-Haul and a leaking roof and a woodstove that hated me personally, and if it comes down to it, I can survive whatever this is or isn't turning into with Rafe Montgomery. I'm not the one I'm worried about.
It's the twins.
Eli asked twice yesterday when we're going back to "Rafe's brewery," like it's a destination now instead of my place of employment, like the man himself is a fixture in our lives instead of someone I've known for a matter of weeks.
Josie drew another picture last night, this one of all four of us standing in front of the brewhouse doors, Biscuit included, everyone smiling with the same crayon-yellow sun overhead.
She didn't ask me to hang it anywhere. She just left it on the counter where she knew I'd find it, which somehow makes it worse.
They've attached fast. Kids do that. Eli and Josie have had one parent disappear on them slowly and the other one disappear on them all at once, and now they just grab hold of anything steady that stands still long enough to let them.
And Rafe hasn't promised them a single thing.
He's just shown up, again and again, in the unglamorous ways that matter, and two eight-year-olds have quietly decided he's theirs to keep.
I keep noticing the small evidence they've collected without me.
Eli's started saying "at Rafe's" the same easy way he used to say "at home.
" Josie keeps track of how many days until she gets to show Rafe her next drawing.
Neither of them has asked me if it's allowed.
They've just decided it is, and I don't have the heart to tell them adults don't always get to want something that simply and keep it.
Some nights I lie awake worrying about it anyway, about letting two kids love someone who never signed up for the job.
What happens if this goes nowhere? What happens if it goes somewhere and then falls apart anyway, the way my marriage did after I convinced myself it was the safest bet I'd ever made?
I don't have an answer that doesn't scare me a little, so I just keep turning it over and not liking it any better the tenth time than the first.
I bring it to Maggie on my day off, over coffee at the corner table she always saves without me asking, because if anyone's going to talk sense into me it's her.
"I need you to talk me out of something," I tell her.
"I'm listening." She doesn't look up from stirring her coffee, which I've learned means she's already got an opinion and is just waiting for me to finish so she can deploy it.
"The twins are getting attached to Rafe.
Fast. Faster than is probably healthy, considering I don't even know what this is yet.
" I wrap both hands around my mug like it's going to anchor me to something.
"If this doesn't work out, they're not just losing whatever I might have had with him.
They're losing him. Again. Another person who mattered and then didn't stick around. "
"Okay."
"That's it? Okay?"
"I'm getting there. Let me finish my coffee first, some of us need caffeine before we solve other people's emotional problems." She takes her time doing exactly that, and I let her, because arguing with Maggie's pacing has never once sped it up.
"Here's my actual opinion, and you're not going to like it. "
"I already don't like it and you haven't said it yet."
"The grumpy ex-military guy who panics at the sound of a nail gun but still drove eleven miles at night to fix a stranger's woodstove is exactly the kind of man worth the risk you're describing.
" She finally looks up at me, steady, no teasing in it now.
"You're not asking me whether he's safe for the twins.
You already know the answer to that. You're asking me to give you permission to be scared of something good, because you've spent so long only trusting the bad kind. "
"That's not what I asked."
"It's what you meant." She goes back to her coffee, infuriatingly calm about having just diagnosed me in under thirty seconds. "Kids get attached to good people. That's not a design flaw, Jenna. That's the whole point of good people."
I don't have a comeback for that, which is usually the surest sign Maggie's right about something.
"For what it's worth," she adds, gentler now, "the twins liking him isn't the risk. The risk is you deciding in advance that it's going to go wrong and acting accordingly, because that's a version of this you can absolutely make happen all on your own, no help required."
"That's uncomfortably specific."
"I've known you two years. I'm allowed to be specific." She finally smiles, softening the whole thing considerably. "You didn't come here for permission to be happy. You came here because some part of you already decided to let this happen and wanted somebody else to say it's not insane."
"Is it insane?"
"A little. Most good things are, at the start." She pats my hand once, businesslike, and changes the subject before I can ask her to explain that any further, which I suspect is exactly her intention.
I spend what's left of the coffee mostly listening to her talk about her granddaughter's soccer schedule instead, grateful for the reprieve even as the original question keeps circling in the back of my mind like something that isn't going to let itself get resolved over a single cup of coffee.
At the brewery, things have gone strange in a way I don't have a good word for.
It's not bad, just careful. Rafe and I have spent the whole week orbiting whatever happened under the fireworks without either of us saying its name out loud, two people tiptoeing around a hole in the floor we both know is there and have silently agreed not to point at.
He's polite. He's professional. He knocks now before he comes into the office, which he never used to do, and he asks about invoices in a tone so carefully neutral it makes me want to throw something at him.
"The Hendricks account needs a signature," I tell him, sliding the folder across the desk.
"Thank you." He signs it without looking up, without the half-second of eye contact that used to come standard with every exchange we had. "Let me know if anything else needs my attention."
"That's it? Just 'let me know'?"
"Is there something else?" He finally looks at me, and for one second something flickers underneath the careful blankness, gone before I can be sure I saw it at all.
"No. Nothing else." I take the folder back once it's signed, and the silence that follows isn't the comfortable kind we used to have. It's the kind that costs something to sit inside of, and we're both pretending not to notice the price.
Maddening is the word I keep landing on. At night, when I'm supposed to be sleeping, I replay the weight of his hand around mine and wonder why a man who drove out to fix my woodstove without being asked twice can't manage two full sentences about anything that actually matters now.
Gunny's picked up on it too, in the way Gunny notices everything and says nothing directly about it, just enough sideways comments to prove he's paying close attention.
"You two are being very professional lately," he tells me one afternoon, setting a stack of invoices on my desk with the air of a man delivering evidence.
"Real formal. Real polite. It's like watching two people try to defuse a bomb by being extremely courteous to it. "
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Sure you don't." He says it exactly the way he says everything, cheerful and entirely unconvinced, and leaves before I can decide whether to argue with him.
I don't push it. I tell myself that's restraint. Some nights I'm not entirely convinced it's not just fear wearing a more respectable coat.
The twins, at least, haven't caught on to the strangeness.
They still charge into the taproom after school like they own the place, still narrate their day to Rafe in exhaustive detail whether he asks for it or not, still treat the careful distance between their mother and their favorite grumpy brewmaster as background noise that doesn't concern them.
I envy them that. I used to be able to want things that simply, before I learned what it costs to be wrong about a person.
It's a quiet evening at the cabin, the kind where the twins have homework spread across the kitchen table and I'm catching up on my own laptop at the counter, when the new-mail chime goes off, small and ordinary, the same sound it makes fifty times a day for nothing in particular.
This time it isn't nothing.
The sender's a law office I don't recognize, a name with too many syllables and a city three states behind me, and my stomach drops through the floor before I've even clicked it open, some animal part of me already bracing before my conscious mind catches up to why.
"Mom, is nine times seven fifty-six or sixty-three?" Eli asks, not looking up from his worksheet.
"Sixty-three," I say, on autopilot, my eyes already on the screen.
I open the email with a hand that isn't quite steady, and there it is, black text on a white background, the kind of ordinary formatting that has no business carrying this much weight.
RE: Walsh, Support Review.
I read the subject line four times before any of the words underneath it start to register as actual sentences, and even then they blur together into something I have to read twice more before it lands.
It's a review. It's a hearing. It's a door I thought I'd locked behind me eight states ago, cracking back open like it was never really shut at all.
Josie's humming something to herself over her spelling list, off-key and unbothered, and Eli's already moved on to the next problem, chewing his pencil with the particular focus he gets when a number refuses to cooperate.
Neither of them has any idea that three feet away, their mother is staring at a subject line that just turned a fresh start into something far less resolved than she'd let herself hope.
I close the laptop halfway, not enough to hide it, just enough to buy myself a few seconds of not looking directly at it, and I sit there with my heart going too fast in a kitchen that still smells like dinner, listening to my kids do homework like the world hasn't just tilted slightly on its axis behind their backs.
I think about calling Maggie. I think about calling no one and just sitting with it until it stops feeling so tight in my chest. Neither one solves the actual problem, which is that some lawyer three states away has decided this is the season to reopen a door I spent a year convincing myself was shut for good.
It was never going to stay this simple. I think I always knew that.
I just didn't expect it to come looking for me on an ordinary evening, in an email with a subject line I'll be reading in my sleep for weeks, while my children argue quietly over whether fifty-six was ever really a reasonable guess.