21. Jenna
JENNA
Rafe cancels movie night with a text four words long, "Can't tonight, sorry, tired," and I stand in my own kitchen staring at my phone for longer than four words should require, waiting for a fifth one that never shows up.
There's no explanation, no follow-up, just tired, like that single word covers whatever's actually going on, and I set the phone face down on the counter because staring at it isn't going to make the rest of the sentence appear.
Two days later he cancels again, this time in person, standing in the taproom doorway with his jacket already halfway on, mumbling something about inventory that needs doing tonight and can't wait until tomorrow.
It's the kind of excuse that technically holds up and doesn't survive a second look, and I don't give it one, because pushing on a man already halfway out a door has never gotten me anywhere useful.
"Everything okay?" I ask anyway, because I can't quite stop myself.
"Fine. Just busy." He's already reaching for his keys, not quite meeting my eyes, and the whole exchange takes maybe fifteen seconds before he's out the door and across the lot toward the brewhouse, boots fast on the gravel like something's chasing him that I can't see.
By the third day I've stopped counting cancellations and started counting something worse: the days since he last laughed without meaning to, since he last showed up without me asking. It's been almost a week now, and I don't like the direction that number's headed.
I catch the staff picking up on it before I'm ready to admit I'm feeling it myself.
Wren's at the register when I come in for my shift that afternoon, running the drawer with more concentration than it usually requires, and when Rafe walks through asking whether the delivery got logged right, his voice comes out clipped in a way I've genuinely never heard him use on an employee before.
"I logged it the way I always log it," Wren says, careful, hands going still over the drawer.
"Then check it again. Something's off by six cases and I don't have time to guess where it went."
"Okay." She doesn't argue, just nods and goes to recheck it, and once he's gone she looks over at me with her eyebrows up, silent question fully formed.
I've got nothing solid to hand her, so I just shrug and start restocking glassware, and the two of us work the rest of the shift without either of us saying what we're both clearly thinking.
Gunny finds me in the walk-in an hour later, arms crossed, watching me organize kegs that don't strictly need organizing.
"You noticed," he says. It isn't a question.
"Hard not to."
"He gets like this sometimes. Not often. Not for years, actually, not since I've worked here." Gunny studies me for a second, weighing something. "This time of year does something to him. Always has, long as I've known him."
"What kind of something?"
"Not my story to tell." He says it gently, no edge in it, and I can tell he knows plenty and has already decided none of it is his to hand over. "Give him room. He'll come back around. He always has before."
"That's not exactly reassuring."
"It's honest, though." He picks up a crate and heads back out, leaving me standing there with a half-organized cooler and a knot in my stomach that doesn't loosen no matter how many kegs I line up.
I know what this looks like. I've seen it before, a man pulling inward, going quiet and short and hard to reach, and the old fear under my ribs wakes right up.
Derek used to get close enough to matter and then turn into someone colder, someone I didn't recognize, and by the time I figured out which version was real it was already too late.
I tell myself it's not the same, standing in the walk-in with cold air raising the hair on my arms. Derek's silences were a weapon, sharpened on purpose, deployed exactly when I'd started to feel steady enough to push back on something.
He'd go quiet for days, watch me scramble to fix whatever I couldn't even name, and only speak again once I'd apologized for something that was never actually mine to apologize for.
It was control. It was never anything but control, dressed up as hurt feelings so I'd spend my energy managing his instead of noticing my own.
This doesn't feel like that, though. Rafe isn't punishing me with the silence. He looks like a man drowning, not a man trying to drown me, and I can feel the difference even if I can't explain it, something in the way his eyes skip past mine, something in the exhaustion sitting in his shoulders.
I don't have proof either way, and that's the part that wears on me most, more than the actual distance does. I've spent years training myself to read a room for danger before it arrives, and right now I just can't get a clear read no matter how hard I try.
Josie notices before Eli does, the way she notices everything that actually matters, curled up on the couch with a book she isn't really reading, watching me over the top of it.
"Rafe hasn't come by in forever," she says.
"He's been busy at the brewery."
"You said that yesterday."
"It's still true today."
She sets the book down, unconvinced, and studies me with the same focused attention she once turned on Rafe's shirt buttons, cataloguing something I'd rather she didn't catalogue. "Did you guys have a fight?"
"No, sweetheart. Nothing like that."
"Then why doesn't he come by?"
I don't have an honest answer that won't scare her, and I'm not willing to hand her a dishonest one either, so I split the difference the way I've learned to do with questions that don't have a clean response.
"Sometimes grown-ups need a little space to sort their own heads out.
It doesn't mean anything's wrong between us. "
"That's what you said about Dad, before it turned out something was very wrong."
The comparison lands harder than she means it to, and I have to sit with it a second before I answer, because she's not wrong to make it. She's just working from the only pattern she's ever had, same as I am.
"This is different," I tell her, and I want it to be true so badly that I almost believe myself saying it. "Rafe's not your dad. He's never once made me feel the way your dad did."
"Then why do you look like you're waiting for something bad?"
There's nothing I can say to that would actually help, so I pull her in against my side instead, and she lets me, tucking herself under my arm the way she used to when she was smaller, and neither of us says anything else about it, though I can feel her still turning it over, still not quite convinced, and I can't really blame her for that.
Eli asks a version of the same question two nights later, blunter about it, less interested in cushioning the blow. "Is Rafe still our boyfriend guy or not?"
"Yeah. He's still with me."
"He hasn't been around. Josie thinks something's wrong. I think you're both being weird about it."
"Everybody's allowed to be a little weird sometimes."
"That's not an answer." He says it with the flat, exasperated logic of a kid who's spent a lot of time recently learning that math problems always have a real answer somewhere, even when they look impossible at first. "You're doing the thing where you say something true that doesn't actually tell me anything. "
He's not wrong about that either, and I don't have a rebuttal ready, so I tell him the truest thing I've got. "I don't fully understand what's going on with him right now. I'm trying to figure it out same as you are. I promise I'll tell you both something real the second I actually know it."
That seems to satisfy him more than reassurance would have, mostly because it's honest, and he goes back to his homework without pressing further, though I catch him glancing toward the window twice over the next hour like he's checking for a truck that isn't coming.
I text Maggie the next morning before the shop opens, and by the time I get there she's already got two coffees poured, taking one look at my face and sliding into the booth across from me like she's been expecting this exact conversation for days.
"You look like you haven't slept," she says.
"I haven't, much."
"Rafe trouble."
"That obvious?" I wrap both hands around the mug, grateful for the heat of it.
"He's canceled on me twice this week. He's short with the staff.
He's working until midnight alone in the brewhouse doing inventory that doesn't take that long, and when I ask if he's okay he says fine like the word costs him something to hand over. "
"And you've decided this means what, exactly?"
"I don't know what it means. That's the problem.
My brain keeps handing me the worst version of the story because it's the only version I've got real experience with.
" I stare down into the coffee, watching the steam curl off it.
"Derek used to disappear like this right before something got bad.
I know Rafe isn't Derek. I know that with my whole chest. But some part of me that doesn't listen to reason keeps waiting for the other shoe. "
Maggie doesn't rush to comfort me, which is one of the things I've always trusted about her. She just watches me for a second, weighing her next words the way she weighs a customer's order when they've clearly changed their mind twice already.
"Have you asked him?"
"About what?"
"What's going on. Directly. With actual words, instead of standing around reading his moods like tea leaves and hoping he volunteers it.
" She says it kindly, but there's no give in it.
"You're a grown woman with a grown man's phone number.
Call him. Ask him straight out what's happening and let him decide what he wants to tell you. "
"What if he doesn't want to tell me anything?"
"Then you'll know that, too, and you can decide what to do with it.
Right now you don't know anything except what your own fear is telling you, and your fear's a terrible narrator.
It's been wrong before." She reaches across and squeezes my hand once, brief and firm.
"You survived a man who used silence as a weapon.
That doesn't mean every silent man is doing the same thing.
Give this one a chance to tell you what's actually going on before you blame him for something he didn't do. "
It's good advice, the kind I'd hand to anyone else in my position without hesitating, and I know it the second she says it.
I still leave the Busy Bean twenty minutes later without calling him, because knowing the right thing and having the nerve to do it are apparently two entirely different skills I haven't finished learning yet.
The rest of the day goes to telling myself I'll call tonight, and then telling myself I'll drive over tonight instead, and then losing my nerve on both counts once the twins are down and the cabin's gone quiet around me.
I sit at the kitchen table with my phone in my hand and Rafe's name on the screen for a long time, thumb hovering, and in the end I set the phone down without doing anything at all, which is its own kind of answer even if I don't like what it says about me.
Close to eleven I give up on sleep entirely and get in the car instead, telling myself I just need air, that I'm not driving anywhere in particular, and somehow I still end up on the road that runs past the brewery, slowing without meaning to the second the building comes into view.
The taproom's dark, closed up for the night, but there's a light on in the brewhouse, one square of gold against a building that should be empty at this hour, and something in my chest pulls tight at the sight of it.
I picture him in there alone, moving between tanks he doesn't actually need to check again tonight, doing the same thing I'm doing out here in a parked car, avoiding a conversation neither of us seems ready to start.
I pull into the lot before I've fully decided to, gravel crunching under the tires louder than it should be this late, and cut the engine, and just sit there for a minute with my hands still on the wheel, watching that one lit window like it might tell me something if I stare at it long enough.
I could go up. I could knock on that door right now and ask him straight out what Maggie told me to ask, get it over with instead of sitting out here replaying the same worried loop I've been running for days.
My hand's actually on the door handle before I stop myself, before I really look at what I'm about to do, walk in on a man clearly trying to hold himself together alone and demand he explain it to me on my timeline instead of his.
That's not fair to him. Whatever this is, he's not doing it to me.
He's doing it despite me, working himself into the ground rather than let whatever this is anywhere near the people he cares about, and pushing my way in tonight would be about easing my own fear more than it would be about actually helping him.
I let go of the handle and sit back, watching the light a while longer, close enough to see a shadow cross behind the curtain once, there and gone.
"Okay," I say out loud, to nobody, to the empty car, to the ridge sitting dark and quiet against the sky beyond the parking lot. "Tonight you get your silence."
I mean it, too, sitting there in the cold with my breath fogging the windshield. Tonight I'll let him have whatever this is without pushing on the door.
Tomorrow's a different promise. Tomorrow I'm knocking, whether he's ready for the question or not, because Maggie's right about one thing even if I hate hearing it. My fear's a terrible narrator, and it's had the microphone long enough.
I start the engine and pull back out onto the road, glancing once more at that square of light in the mirror before it disappears behind the trees, and I drive home already rehearsing what I'm going to say tomorrow, already bracing for whatever answer's waiting on the other side of finally asking.