35. Jenna
JENNA
Iwake up determined, which is not the same thing as waking up unafraid, but it's close enough to work with. Derek does not get today. I decided that around midnight, lying awake staring at the ceiling, and I wake up still holding onto it.
The porch light's still burning from last night's new motion sensor when I step outside for the mail, and a patrol car rolls past slow enough to be visible and not slow enough to look like anything, Cole's version of a good morning wave.
I lift a hand anyway. Small towns take care of their own.
Even the parts of this one that used to feel unbearably nosy read differently to me now, less like gossip and more like a net stretched under me that I didn't know was there until I actually needed it.
At breakfast the twins are both vibrating with the specific energy of kids who've spent a week gluing paper hearts to shoeboxes, Eli narrating his entire valentine strategy like a man briefing a supply drop.
"I'm giving the dinosaur ones to the boys and the unicorn ones to the girls," he explains, entirely serious, buttering toast with the focus of a surgeon. "Except Marcus. Marcus gets a dinosaur one even though he's kind of annoying, because that's the rule. Everybody gets one."
"That's a good rule."
"It's the only rule Ms. Palmer gave us that actually makes sense." He considers this. "The no-glitter rule makes sense too, but Josie's not going to follow it."
"I heard that," Josie says, not looking up from where she's carefully printing her name onto the last of a stack of paper hearts, each one already dusted with enough gold shimmer to be visible from orbit.
"You were supposed to."
The twins' classroom is a disaster of pink and red construction paper by the time I drop them off, valentine boxes decorated within an inch of their lives sitting in a row on the counter, and I've barely made it to the car before my phone buzzes with a text from the volunteer coordinator asking if anyone's free to help chaperone the party that afternoon.
I say yes before I've fully thought it through, mostly because staying busy today feels like its own kind of armor.
By the time I get back at one, the classroom already smells like sugar and craft glue, and Josie greets me at the door glittering, actually glittering, from her hairline to her shoes, a fine gold shimmer covering roughly forty percent of her visible skin.
"There was an incident," she informs me solemnly, like she's reporting a structure fire.
"I can see that."
"Marcus opened his valentine bag wrong."
"Is Marcus okay?"
"Marcus is fine. Marcus is glitter now too." She says this with the flat satisfaction of someone reporting justice served. "It's on the ceiling, Mom. Actual ceiling."
Sure enough, when I look up, there's a faint gold haze across the classroom's drop ceiling tiles that no amount of vacuuming is going to fully solve for weeks, and the teacher gives me a look over the heads of twenty-two sugared-up eight-year-olds that says she has already made peace with several of her life choices today.
I'm helping sort the last of the valentine cards into bags when Eli's teacher calls me over with the particular calm voice adults use specifically to keep children from panicking, and I find my son sitting very still at his desk, lips slightly swollen, a rash blooming faint and pink across his chin.
"He had two of the red conversation hearts," she says, already reaching for the nurse's line on the classroom phone. "Might be the dye. He says his mouth feels itchy, nothing worse than that so far."
"Eli. Talk to me."
"I'm okay," he says, sounding more annoyed than scared, which I've learned over the years is usually the more reliable indicator. "It just feels weird. Like when your foot falls asleep, but my lips."
The nurse checks him over, calls it a mild reaction, watches him for twenty minutes while I sit beside him holding his hand and trying not to let him see exactly how fast my heart's still going, and by the time we're cleared to go back to the party he's fully recovered and mostly annoyed that he missed the second round of cupcakes.
Josie brings him one anyway, smuggled in a napkin, glitter still drifting off her in a fine, unstoppable haze.
"You're basically a warning label now," Eli tells her, inspecting the cupcake for damage.
"I'm festive."
"You're a hazard."
"Same thing, today."
We make it home eventually, both kids gold-dusted and sugar-crashed and thoroughly alive despite the day's best efforts to convince me otherwise, and I feel something in my chest loosen for the first time since I woke up this morning bracing for a fight that never actually came.
Derek didn't call. Derek didn't text. Whatever he's doing with his day, it isn't happening here, in this house, on this particular one I refused to hand over to him.
I run the twins through a bath that turns the water briefly, alarmingly gold, get them into pajamas, and read half a chapter of whatever adventure book Eli's currently obsessed with before both of them go down easier than they have in weeks, worn clean through by sugar and glue and the sheer effort of an eight-year-old's version of a full day.
I check the porch light out of habit before I head back downstairs, check the front door lock too, a small ritual I've added without really deciding to, and something about doing it tonight feels less like fear and more like simply taking care of the people I love, no different than checking that the stove's off.
Rafe shows up a little after the twins go down, later than usual, and there's something in the careful way he's holding the bag in his hand that tells me this isn't a normal, unplanned stop-by.
"You're doing the thing," I tell him, echoing Gunny without meaning to, watching him hesitate on my own front porch like a man bracing for an inspection.
"What thing?"
"The thing where you've clearly got something and you're deciding how to hand it over."
"Fair." He steps inside, and instead of handing me the bag right away he sets it on the kitchen table and pulls out a single bottle, unlabeled except for a strip of paper taped carefully around the neck, hand lettering in his own blocky, careful print.
JENNA'S AMBER. Underneath it, smaller, a little pencil sketch of a dandelion, the exact one I remember from a shelf in his loft.
I don't say anything right away. I can't. I just turn the bottle slowly in my hands, tracing the edge of the paper label with one finger, the whole thing so plainly made by hand that I can see where he pressed too hard on one letter and had to start the strip over, a second faint outline of a J showing through underneath the final version.
"You kept the mistake in there," I say finally, running my thumb over it.
"Couldn't find more paper at eleven at night. Figured it added character." He watches me study it a moment longer before he continues, like he needs to see me actually holding it before he can finish explaining himself.
"It's a small batch. Six bottles total, and every one of them is yours, because this batch was never mine to keep.
" He rubs the back of his neck, a rare unguarded fidget I've only seen a handful of times.
"I brewed it around what you actually like instead of what sells.
More honey than the regular amber, a little less bite. Took me four tries to get it right."
"You brewed me my own beer."
"I brewed you six bottles of your own beer and drew a flower on the label because apparently that's just how romance comes out of me, and this was the version that made sense to me." He says it almost sheepishly, like he's bracing for me to find it ridiculous.
I don't find it ridiculous. I find it exactly right in a way roses or a box of chocolates never could have managed, understated and specific and entirely him, a man who apologizes with woodstove repairs and now, apparently, loves with a hand-labeled bottle of beer he brewed four times until it matched something only he'd noticed about me.
"This is the best gift anyone's ever given me." I hold the bottle up to the light like it might reveal some new detail I missed the first three times I looked. "Truly. Nothing else even comes close."
"You haven't even tasted it yet."
"I don't need to. Pour it anyway."
We eat dinner at the kitchen table, nothing fancy, pasta and garlic bread and a candle I light mostly for the ceremony of it, both of us still smelling faintly of a day that tried to knock us both sideways and mostly failed.
The amber's good, better than good, honeyed and easy and unmistakably built around every small preference I've ever mentioned to him in passing without realizing he was cataloguing it.
"You really tracked all this from things I just said out loud once?" I ask, refilling both our glasses.
"I remember everything you tell me. It's a problem, mostly for me, since half of it is you complaining about how bitter the seasonal stuff gets by the second batch." He shrugs, unbothered by his own thoroughness. "Figured I'd finally put it to use for something."
We talk about the glitter, about Eli's lips, about Gunny's ongoing campaign to convince Cole the brewery needs a perimeter alarm, easy and unhurried, the exact kind of ordinary night I promised myself this day would still have room for.
Somewhere between the pasta and the last of the candle burning low, Rafe goes quiet, studying me with a look I haven't quite catalogued before, softer than his usual careful attention, something unguarded working its way loose behind his eyes.
"What?" I ask.
"Nothing. Just looking at you." He shakes his head slightly, like he's arguing with himself over something small.
"There's a version of this year where I never let myself get here.
Where I keep the fund anonymous forever, keep the loft empty, keep being the guy who fixes things for people and doesn't let anybody fix anything in him. I almost stayed that guy."
"You didn't, though."
"No. I didn't." His thumb moves slowly over my knuckles, back and forth, like he's confirming something with his hands that his voice hasn't caught up to yet. "I love you."
He says it plain, no windup, no speech built around it.
Not like the driveway, rushed and folded into a goodbye with the twins standing right there and a truck door already half shut behind him.
This is just us, at a kitchen table, candle burning down to almost nothing, and the words come out of him like they caught him off guard on the way out.
"I love you," I say back, immediately, no gap between his words and mine for doubt to crawl into, like I'd been ready to say it for exactly this kind of ordinary, unguarded moment.
He exhales, something in his shoulders unwinding all the way for what might be the first time since I've known him, and for a long stretch neither of us reaches for anything else to say, just sitting there with our hands joined over a half-eaten dinner and a candle burning down between us, Derek's text still sitting untouched in a file Cole's building somewhere three states out of reach of this exact kitchen tonight.
Whatever else this day was supposed to cost me, it gave back more than it took.