26. Rafe
RAFE
I've never bought a kid a Christmas present in my adult life, and the toy aisle in Hartwell knows it the second I walk in.
One aisle, floor to ceiling, an entire county's worth of childhood crammed into forty feet of shelving, and I stand at the end of it with a cart and no plan, more lost than I've felt in a long while.
"You look like you're about to breach a room," Gunny says, ambling up beside me with his own cart already half full of things I didn't see him pick up.
"I've got zero actionable intel on what an eight-year-old wants."
"Nobody does. That's the secret nobody tells you. You just buy things and hope." He nods at the shelf in front of me, packed with everything from board games to a suspicious number of slime kits. "What's the mission brief?"
"Eli likes taking things apart to see how they work. Josie likes making things. That's the entire intelligence file I've got."
"That's more than most people start with." Gunny grabs a box off the shelf without even reading it and drops it in my cart. "There. Metal detector. Kid who likes taking things apart is going to lose his mind over a machine that finds hidden objects for a living."
I pick it up, read the box twice, and put it in the cart properly instead of loose. "Huh. That's actually good."
"I have my moments." He's already three steps down the aisle, scanning shelves with the focused efficiency of a man who's apparently done this before. "Art stuff's two aisles over. Come on."
On the way over we pass a shelf of plastic soldiers and miniature Humvees, and I stop half a second longer than I mean to, staring down at a peg of tiny green figures frozen mid-charge, rifles raised, nothing about them close enough to real to mean anything, and yet enough to catch me sideways for a second anyway.
Gunny doesn't say anything, just waits until I move on, the kind of quiet that isn't awkward so much as familiar, a man who's learned exactly which of my pauses don't need filling.
The art aisle turns out to be smaller than I expected and somehow still capable of destroying my confidence completely, colored pencils and paint sets and sketchbooks in six different sizes lined up like a dare.
I stand there running the numbers the way I'd run supply requisitions, trying to figure out the minimum viable purchase that won't leave her disappointed on the one morning a year disappointment isn't allowed.
"Get all of it," Gunny says, watching me deliberate.
"All of it?"
"You're doing the thing where you're trying to guess exactly right.
You can't. Nobody can. Buy the pencils, the paints, the good sketchbook, the bad sketchbook, the case to put it all in.
More is safer than wrong." He starts loading my cart himself, not waiting for permission, stacking boxes with the same brisk efficiency he brings to inventory day.
"Kid's not going to be upset you got her too much art stuff, Rafe. That's not a failure mode that exists."
"This feels like overcorrecting."
"Overcorrecting for what? You've got exactly one shot at this and you're worried about excess.
Buy the excess." He drops a case of watercolors on top of the pile, and the cart's getting genuinely heavy now, wheels squeaking under the weight of an entire art supply store's inventory.
"You want to know the actual mistake people make with kids at Christmas?
Thinking small because they're scared of getting it wrong.
Nobody remembers getting too much. Everybody remembers the year it felt like nobody tried. "
I don't have a comeback for that, mostly because he's right, and we finish the aisle with a cart that looks less like a Christmas run and more like we're restocking an actual store, and by the time we hit the register the woman ringing us up gives Gunny a look somewhere between amused and concerned.
"Grandkids?" she asks.
"Not exactly," Gunny says, and doesn't elaborate, and I don't either, because explaining the actual shape of what Jenna's kids are to me would take longer than either of us has standing at a register in Hartwell three days before Christmas.
We load the truck in comfortable quiet, breath fogging in the cold, and Gunny leans against the tailgate once the last bag's in, studying me with the particular patience he saves for conversations he's decided need to happen.
"You didn't embarrass yourself in there," he says. "Not bad, for a man who's never done this."
"I had help."
"You had a foreman. There's a difference."
"Foreman doesn't usually pick out an entire store's worth of watercolors without being asked."
"Foreman also isn't the one who has to carry it all inside without waking anybody up. That part's still you." He zips his jacket up against the wind. "How's the other thing coming?"
He doesn't say which other thing, and he doesn't need to. There's only ever one other thing between us this time of year.
"Finalizing it tonight," I say. "Bigger than usual this time."
"How much bigger?"
"Enough that Denise is going to ask me twice if I'm sure before she processes it." I climb into the driver's seat, and Gunny gets in beside me without pushing further, which is its own kind of mercy. "It felt right this year. Don't ask me why."
"You don't owe me the why." He says it plainly, watching the road unspool through the windshield as I pull out of the lot. "You've never once owed me the why on this one."
That night, once the twins' gifts are wrapped and hidden in the back of my closet where no eight-year-old detective work will find them, I settle in at the kitchen table with my laptop open and the transfer form pulled up, the same one I fill out every month, except this is the holiday version, padded heavier than the rest the way it's been every year since the first Christmas after I got out, back when the amount felt like the only apology I knew how to make.
I type in the new number, larger than last year's holiday total, and sit with my thumb over the button for longer than the decision actually requires.
Denise picks up on the second ring when I call to confirm it, brisk as ever even this late in the evening.
"Montgomery. You're pushing this through awfully close to the holiday."
"I know. I wanted it there before Christmas, not after."
"It's a significant jump from last year's figure. You want me to flag anything special on the transfer memo, or keep it the way you always have it?"
"No special flag. Same as always." There's no name attached, no note, no return address, just six years of the same careful anonymity that used to feel like the only kind thing I had left to offer. "Just make sure it lands before the twenty-fifth."
"It'll land." Something rustles on her end, papers or a folder, brief and businesslike. "You know, most people who set up funds like this eventually want to know how it's landing on the other end. You've never asked me once."
"I know how it's landing." I've read the acknowledgment letters every year, brief and formal, a woman I've never met thanking an anonymous donor for a kindness she doesn't know is guilt wearing a nicer name.
"I just never wanted her to have to say thank you to somebody who never even had the decency to sign it. "
"That's a generous way to look at not wanting to face something.
" Denise says it without malice, just an old woman who's processed this exact transfer enough times to have earned an opinion on it.
"For what it's worth, Mr. Montgomery, six years is a long time to keep sending money to somebody you've never let say your name out loud. "
I don't have a clean answer for that, so I thank her and end the call.
The ache that follows is the same one I sit with every year, familiar enough by now that I could describe it with my eyes closed.
Except this year it doesn't stay familiar.
It sits differently, restless instead of settled, and underneath the usual guilt there's something new working loose, a want I haven't let myself feel in six years of doing this in silence.
I want her to know it's me.
Marisol Alvarez is Danny's older sister, carrying a married name he never lived long enough to hear her use, the only family he had left.
She's spent six years thanking a routing number instead of a face.
I've read her name on those acknowledgment letters so many times it stopped looking like a stranger's a while ago, and somewhere in the last few months, the wanting turned from a stray thought into something I can't put back down.
I get up and walk to the shelf by my window, where the photograph's sat face down since I moved into this loft, untouched, unlooked at, six years of avoiding a face that once came to mind without any effort at all.
I don't turn it over tonight. I'm not there yet.
But I stand there with my hand resting flat on the back of the frame longer than I have since I first set it there, and for the first time it doesn't feel like avoidance. It feels like getting ready.
Meeting her means finally saying it to a face instead of a form, finally standing in front of the one person on earth with every right to hate me for the call I made on that road, and letting her decide what she wants to do with that instead of deciding for her, year after year, that anonymous money was as close as I could safely get.
It's a decision that scares me more than six years of silent transfers ever did. Money's easy. Money doesn't ask you to look someone in the eye and explain why her brother isn't the one still breathing.
I pull up flights before I can talk myself back down from it, find one that gets me there and back inside a handful of days, and book it before the part of my brain that's spent so long avoiding this exact moment can finish building its case against it.
The confirmation email lands in my inbox two minutes later, plain and ordinary, like it isn't the biggest thing I've done since I got out of the Army.
Twelve days is the number I keep circling back to once the confirmation lands, the stretch between tonight and the flight, between deciding and actually doing, and it feels impossibly short and entirely too long depending on which minute I check it.
For twelve days I get to keep being the man everyone around here already knows, the guy who just bought out an art aisle for two kids who aren't his by blood, the boss Gunny still can't quite believe learned how to buy a Christmas present, whatever exactly I am to Jenna these days.
Then, briefly, I'll also be the man who has to stand in front of Marisol Alvarez and explain himself.
I don't tell Gunny the real reason, not tonight.
I don't tell Jenna at all yet, not until I know what I'm actually walking into and whether I'll have anything left to bring home once I've said it.
For now this stays mine to carry alone, same as it's always been, one more thing I'm not ready to hand to anybody else just yet.
But the loop's closing. Six years of sending money into silence, letting her thank a name she's never heard me say, and I've finally booked the flight that ends it. Whatever's waiting on the other side of that door, I'm done hiding from it.