13. Jenna
JENNA
The storm's gone by the time I wake up, and so, apparently, is every ounce of whatever happened between us last night.
I know it's morning because of the light, thin and gray and coming in low through the one window that isn't fogged over, and I know the storm's cleared because I can hear a plow somewhere down the valley, grinding its way through what's left of six inches that turned into closer to fourteen by the time it finally quit.
I spent the night curled in the single armchair, knees to my chest, wrapped in a wool blanket that smells like cedar and rain and definitely isn't mine.
Somewhere around four I woke up long enough to notice Rafe had gone still on the floor by the twins instead of anywhere near the bed, one arm thrown over his eyes, looking for all the world like a man standing watch even in his sleep.
He's not on the floor now. He's up, dressed, moving through the small kitchen area with the kind of brisk efficiency that makes it look like he's been awake for hours, which, knowing him, he probably has.
"Pancakes or waffles," he says, not quite looking at me, already pulling a box of mix down from a shelf I didn't notice last night. "I've got both. Don't ask why."
"You had pancake mix in a bachelor loft this whole time."
"I plan for things."
"You said that last night too."
"It's still true." He sets the box on the counter with more force than pancake mix requires, and something about the careful set of his shoulders tells me exactly how much effort is going into this particular version of casual.
"Waffles," Eli announces from the floor, already rolling his blanket into a lopsided cylinder. "With syrup. A lot of it."
"That's not a topping request, that's a hazard."
"I want pancakes," Josie says, stretching with the total-body commitment of a cat. "With the syrup in a separate cup so it doesn't make everything soggy before I'm ready for it."
"That's oddly specific," Rafe says, and for one second his eyes flick to me before he catches himself and looks back at the griddle, and I catch it even if he doesn't, my own words handed back to me from somewhere around midnight last night.
I don't say anything about it. I pour myself coffee instead, black, from a machine that looks older than the twins, and watch him work the griddle like it's a piece of equipment that requires his full tactical attention, and it very much does not.
Gunny's voice carries up the stairwell before he does, already mid-report about the parking lot before his boots clear the top step. "Lot's plowed. Roads to the highway are open, but Main Street's still a mess. You want me to call the guy about the compressor before or after breakfast?"
"After," Rafe says, not looking up from the griddle. "Nobody's fixing anything on an empty stomach."
"Since when do you have rules about breakfast?"
"Since always. You've just never been awake early enough to notice."
Gunny surveys the room, twins at the table, blankets still bunched by the window, me standing there with a coffee mug and last night written all over a space that usually doesn't have witnesses, and something in his face says he's clocked exactly as much as I'm afraid he has.
He doesn't say a word about any of it. He just helps himself to a waffle straight off the plate and heads back downstairs whistling something far too cheerful for the hour.
Breakfast happens fast and loud, the twins arguing about whether syrup counts as a topping or a delivery system, Biscuit stationed under the table with the focused patience of a dog who knows crumbs are inevitable, and through all of it Rafe stays exactly one careful step removed from me, refilling coffee, wiping counters, checking his phone for road updates, never quite landing in the same three feet of space I'm standing in for longer than a few seconds.
I've seen this particular kind of retreat before, not from him but from myself.
More than once, in the years after Derek, something good would happen and some old, well-worn part of me got convinced the safest response was to pretend it hadn't.
It isn't regret. I know that feeling too well to mistake it for anything else.
It's fear, wearing regret's clothes because fear's harder to admit to out loud.
It takes one to know one, my mother used to say, usually about something far less complicated than this.
I never expected to find out how true it was, standing in his kitchen and watching him flip pancakes like the last twelve hours never happened.
I don't push. I've been on the other end of being pushed, questions landing like accusations when all a person actually needs is time, so instead I finish my coffee, help the twins into their coats, and let Rafe walk us down to the truck he's somehow already got running and scraped clear of snow.
"Roads are open as far as the highway," he says, holding the door for Josie like it's any other morning. "Should be an easy drive."
"Thank you. For everything." I mean it as more than politeness and I think he hears that, because something flickers across his face before he shuts it down again, quick and practiced.
"Anytime." One word, and he delivers it like the period at the end of a sentence he doesn't want to keep writing.
I load the twins in, and on my way back through the taproom to grab the bag I left by the office door, I stop at his desk with an idea that's been forming since somewhere around the second cup of coffee.
There's a paper cup on the counter, empty, left over from yesterday's rush before the storm hit.
I fill it from the machine, black, the way he likes it, and dig a pen out of the bottom of my purse.
Thanks for the rescue. J.
I write it small, on the sleeve, nothing dramatic, nothing that demands an answer. I set the cup square in the middle of his desk where he can't miss it and can't misread it either, a door left open instead of one I'm knocking on, and I leave before I can talk myself into writing something bigger.
The drive out of the brewery lot is slow going, snow banked high on both sides where the plow's been through, and the twins settle into the particular quiet that comes after a big adventure finally runs out of steam.
Eli falls asleep against the window somewhere past the second mile marker.
Josie stays awake, forehead against the glass, watching the white fields go by like she's cataloguing something.
"Mom."
"Yeah, baby."
"Is Rafe going to be our friend now?"
I glance at her in the rearview mirror, and there's nothing performative in the question, no angle to it, just an eight-year-old asking the thing she actually wants to know in the most direct language available to her.
I take a second before I answer, because she deserves a real one and not just whatever's easiest to say at a stop sign.
"I don't know yet, sweetheart."
"Why not? You know everything else."
"I don't, actually. Not even close." I ease through the intersection, checking twice for ice I can't quite see. "Some things you don't get to know in advance. You just have to wait and find out along with everybody else."
"That sounds annoying."
"It really is."
"Do you want him to be our friend?"
That one lands harder than the first, and I don't answer it right away, because I'm honestly not sure I trust my own voice to stay level if I try. Josie doesn't push either, she just watches the snow-covered mailboxes go by, patient in the exact way her brother never quite manages to be.
"I think I do," I say finally. "I'm still figuring out what that means, though."
"That's a very grown-up answer."
"I had a very grown-up night."
"Was it fun?"
"Parts of it," I say, and I catch myself almost smiling at the windshield, the road having nothing to do with it.
Eli stirs awake as we pull up to the school, blinking hard against the glare off the snowbanks, and both kids scramble out with backpacks and half-finished stories about pancakes and generators and a dog the size of a small couch, already turning the whole night into the kind of legend eight-year-olds specialize in building.
I watch them cross the lot toward the doors, Josie's hand finding Eli's without either of them seeming to notice they've done it, and something in my chest goes soft and useless the way it always does the second I drop them off, easy morning or hard one.
The drive back toward the brewery takes eleven minutes if the lights cooperate, and today they don't. I catch every single one red, one after another down Main Street, snowplows still working the intersections, and at each one I do the thing I told myself in the shower this morning I absolutely would not do.
I check my phone.
There's nothing waiting for me, no text, no missed call, not even one of those meaningless notifications that usually clutter up my lock screen by this hour.
I tell myself it's fine. I tell myself a paper cup and four scrawled words don't obligate anyone to respond within an hour, that Rafe's probably knee deep in storm cleanup, checking on suppliers and generators and whatever else a brewery needs after fourteen inches of snow tries to bury it.
The other silence is still sitting in that same inbox, further down, unopened since the night it arrived, a lawyer's name and a subject line about Walsh I still haven't found the nerve to answer.
The storm buried it under enough noise that I almost forgot it was there.
Almost. Some fights you can only take on one at a time, and this morning the only one I've got room for is a coffee cup on a desk fifteen feet from where I used to feel steady.
At the second light I check again anyway, and it's still nothing, and I feel something small and disappointed try to surface before I shove it back down where it came from.
At the third light I don't even pretend I'm not doing it on purpose.
By the fourth light I've stopped lying to myself about why I keep looking.
It isn't really about the cup, and it isn't even about the kiss.
It's about the silence that follows something that mattered, the ache of not hearing from someone whose voice I've suddenly started listening for.
I've lived through worse silences before, the kind that meant something bad was coming.
This isn't that. It still has weight, though, and I feel it between one red light and the next.
The last light before the brewery turns green just as I roll up to it, no delay this time, no excuse to check the screen one more time before I have to commit to driving instead.
I set the phone face down on the passenger seat, out of easy reach, and tell myself firmly that I refuse to spend the rest of the morning waiting on four scrawled words to earn a reply.
I mostly believe myself.
The brewery comes into view at the top of the hill, snow still deep on the roof, smoke curling thin and steady from the chimney over the taproom, and somewhere inside it there's a man who kissed me like he meant it and then spent this morning making pancakes like it never happened.
I don't know yet what any of that adds up to.
I don't know if the cup on his desk is going to mean anything to him at all, or if it's just going to sit there getting cold while he finds a hundred careful reasons not to look at it too closely.
I pull into the lot anyway, because I've got payroll to run and a business to help hold together, and because whatever this is between us, I'm not ready to let one quiet morning talk me out of it. Not this soon. Not after everything last night actually was.