34. Rafe
RAFE
Jenna calls before she's even out of the parking lot, and I hear it in her voice before she gets three words out, that particular flatness people use when they're working hard not to sound as rattled as they actually are.
"He was just sitting there," she says. "Watching us. Like he had every right to be there."
"Are you safe right now?"
"We're in the car. Doors locked. He didn't follow us out, didn't say anything, just sat there the whole time drinking his coffee like it was any other morning." A breath, shaky, then steadier. "I don't know why that scared me more than if he'd actually done something."
"Because it was a message." I'm already grabbing my keys off the hook by the office door, already running the shape of the next hour in my head, calm settling over me the way it used to before a mission, methodical instead of frantic.
"He wanted you to see him seeing you. That's the whole point of showing up somewhere public and doing nothing.
It's control without anything he can be charged for. "
"That's a comforting thought."
"It's not meant to be comforting. It's meant to be accurate." I'm in the truck now, engine turning over. "I'm coming to you. We're going to figure out exactly what we do next, together, and none of it happens without you signing off on it first."
I notice something missing on the drive over before I notice much else, the panic that usually shoots straight from my chest to my hands the second a threat registers.
It isn't there. My hands are steady on the wheel.
My mind's already three steps ahead, cataloguing what I know, what I don't, what Sheriff Cole's actually going to be able to do about a man who sat in a coffee shop and drank a beverage.
Six months ago a nail gun put me on my knees behind my own building with my hands shaking too hard to hold a hammer.
Today an actual threat to the people I love most in the world walks up and I'm running numbers instead of running blind.
I don't know exactly when that changed. I just know it did, somewhere in the stretch of months between one bad night on a ranch road and a stranger's porch in Norfolk and every steady day since.
I'll figure out who to thank for that later, because right now Jenna's voice is still shaking faintly under the calm she's trying to hold onto for the twins' sake.
Jenna's at the cabin when I get there, twins parked in front of a show with a bowl of crackers between them, blessedly unaware of anything beyond whatever cartoon's currently holding their attention.
Josie glances up long enough to wave at me with a cracker still in her hand, entirely unbothered, and something in my chest eases a fraction just watching her go straight back to the screen without a shred of the fear sitting in her mother's face right now.
Whatever this turns into, I want it to stay that way for both of them, ordinary and small and safe enough to be bored by.
Jenna meets me at the door, and I pull her in before either of us says anything else, holding on longer than the moment strictly requires because I need it as much as she does.
"Okay," I say, once we're at the kitchen table, notebook open, the same one I use for brewery inventory now covered in a different kind of list entirely.
"Let's talk to Cole first. Then we figure out the practical stuff.
Then we call Priya and get this on record for the case, because a man showing up uninvited to watch his ex-wife and kids from a corner table doesn't exactly help his changed-man narrative. "
"You already thought of that."
"I think of everything. It's a personality flaw people keep telling me is actually useful."
That gets the smallest laugh out of her, tired but real, and I count it as a win before I pick up the phone.
Cole answers on the second ring, unhurried the way he always is, like nothing in this town has ever actually surprised him.
"Rafe. Heard there was some excitement at the Bean this morning."
"Small town."
"Smallest." Something shifts in his voice, professional now instead of easy. "Walk me through it."
I do, plain and complete, and I hear him writing while I talk, the scratch of a pen against paper on the other end of the line.
"Here's where we are legally," he says, once I've finished. "Sitting in a public place isn't a crime. Watching somebody isn't a crime, not on its own, not without a pattern established. I can't arrest a man for drinking coffee, much as I'd probably enjoy it."
"So we do nothing?"
"So you document everything, every single time, and you let me build a file.
One incident is unsettling. A pattern is a restraining order I can actually get a judge to sign.
" Cole's voice stays level, patient with a bluntness that doesn't feel unkind.
"I'll swing a patrol car past the cabin and the brewery a few extra times a day.
Not enough to spook him into thinking you're scared, just enough that if he tries anything else, somebody official already has eyes on the pattern forming. "
"That's it?"
"That's the legal side of it, and I know it feels thin against a man who just rattled your whole household with a cup of coffee and a stare.
But thin and real beats satisfying and illegal every time I've watched it play out.
" Cole lets that sit a beat before he continues.
"Which doesn't mean you and I can't have a separate conversation about practical safety, off the record and away from anything Priya actually needs to know about.
" I can hear the smile in it, small and knowing.
"You strike me as a man who's already made three lists in his head since you called. "
"Four."
"'Course it's four." He laughs, short and real. "Let's hear them."
We spend the next twenty minutes going through exactly that, Cole tempering every instinct I have toward overcorrection with the calm of a man who's actually done this before.
By the time we hang up we've got a plan.
Motion lights at both entrances to the cabin, easy and cheap enough to finish by tomorrow, a camera mounted at the brewery's back door where the deliveries come in, reasonable enough that Cole approves it without blinking, and an updated pickup protocol at the school that Jenna's already setting up before Cole even finishes the sentence, so the front office knows exactly who's authorized and who isn't. What I don't get is the perimeter fence I'd started sketching in my head somewhere around minute three of the phone call, and Cole shuts that down without even pretending to consider it.
"You put up a fence like that, you're not protecting her.
You're building a story his lawyer gets to tell a judge about the paranoid ex-military boyfriend turning her house into a compound.
" He says it kindly but firmly, the exact tone I imagine he uses on drunk teenagers and stubborn ranchers alike.
"Lights. Cameras. Documentation. That's the whole plan.
You don't get to solve this one with plywood and good intentions. "
I don't love it. I say so. Jenna reaches over and squeezes my hand under the table, and something in that small, steady gesture does more to settle me than anything Cole's said.
"He's right," she says, once we've hung up. "I need this handled the way that actually protects us in court, not the way that makes you feel better standing guard with a flashlight."
"I know he's right. Doesn't mean the flashlight plan doesn't sound better to the half of me still wired for doing exactly this kind of thing for a living."
"I love that part of you. I just also need the part of you that knows when to let a professional handle it." She holds my eyes, steady. "Both parts. That's who I need tonight."
"Copy that."
Gunny turns up at the brewery within the hour carrying a canvas bag I recognize with a sinking feeling, and by the time Cole swings by to check the camera installation himself, Gunny's already got a hand-drawn diagram taped to the back office wall, complete with sightlines, a proposed rotation schedule for "overwatch shifts," and an arrow labeled FALLBACK POSITION pointing at the walk-in cooler.
"Absolutely not," Cole says, studying the diagram with the resigned patience of a man who's clearly talked Gunny down from some other imagined crisis before, more than once, years back.
"It's a solid plan."
"It's a plan for repelling an armed assault on a brewery, Gunny. This is a man who drinks decaf and hasn't broken a single law."
"Today."
"Today's all we've got jurisdiction over." Cole pulls the diagram down, folds it in half with the calm efficiency of a man handling a toddler's crayon drawing, and hands it back. "Go put your energy into making sure the actual camera's aimed at the actual door. That's the assignment."
Gunny grumbles the whole walk to the back door, muttering something about civilians never appreciating proper threat assessment, and I catch Jenna fighting a smile over his shoulder, the first real one I've seen from her all day.
It's late by the time the lights are up and the camera's mounted and the twins are finally down, both of us collapsed on the couch in the particular silence that comes after a day spent handling everything except the actual fear underneath it.
Jenna's phone buzzes on the coffee table, and I watch her whole body go still before she even picks it up, some instinct in her already bracing before her conscious mind catches up.
She reads it once. Her face doesn't change right away, which somehow scares me more than if it had.
"What is it?"
She turns the screen toward me without a word.
I'll fight for what's mine.
I read it twice, then a third time, then a fourth, watching the words rearrange themselves and land on the same meaning every time. Two days before a holiday built around love, and here's a man reaching across three states with six words meant to sound reasonable and land like a threat anyway.
"Document it," I say, quiet, already reaching for my own phone to photograph the screen before anything can happen to it. "Send it to Cole tonight. Send it to Priya first thing."
Jenna doesn't answer right away, just stares at the words like she's daring them to mean something different the fifth time through, and I put my arm around her and draw her in close against me, steady, present, exactly the man she needs tonight instead of the one who wants to drive three states over and end this himself.
"Two days," she says finally, quiet. "Two days until Valentine's Day, and this is what shows up instead of flowers."
"We're not letting him have that day too." I press a kiss into her hair, meaning every word of it. "Whatever he thinks he's fighting for, he's not getting it. Not while I'm still standing here."
She turns her phone face down on the coffee table, the same motion I've made a hundred times myself over the years, and leans into me like she's borrowing some of whatever steadiness I've got left to spare tonight. I've got plenty. I intend to keep it that way for as long as this takes.
Outside the window the porch light Cole helped me angle catches the first thin snow of the night, and somewhere three states away a man who thinks a text message counts as a plan has no idea what he's actually up against.