40. Rafe
RAFE
Four days after the ruling, and I still haven't slept through a single one of them.
I tell myself it's just the adjustment, the strange comedown after five weeks of bracing for a hit that never actually landed, but that's a lie I stopped believing by the second night.
It isn't relief keeping me up. It's Bennett's voice, smooth and patient, laying out exactly what I am to a judge like he'd rehearsed it in a mirror.
He called me unvetted, unaccounted for, a documented history of combat trauma with no formal role in those children's lives and no obligation to answer for how it might resurface under stress.
We won. Jenna has her kids, full custody, Derek leashed down to supervised visits he has to earn back one compliant month at a time.
It should feel like the ending. Instead it feels like a verdict on the wrong defendant, one nobody bothered to read out loud because everyone else in that courtroom already knew the actual outcome that mattered.
I run inventory twice a day now instead of once, alphabetize invoices Jenna already alphabetized, find reasons to be anywhere in this building that isn't near enough to my own thoughts to hear them clearly.
None of it works. Bennett's words don't fade the way I keep expecting them to.
They just get quieter and more permanent, settling into the same place that old voice has always lived, the one that never fully left no matter how many good months I stacked on top of it.
I keep a legal pad on the desk in the office, the same habit I've leaned on since the day Priya first called with the hearing date, and I catch myself reaching for it three separate times, stopping each time with the pen an inch off the page because whatever I'm building isn't a plan.
It's an exit disguised as a plan, careful language dressed up to make retreat sound more responsible than it actually is.
I close the notebook each time without writing anything down, because some part of me still knows the difference even while the rest of me keeps arguing past it.
Gunny finds me in the brewhouse on the fourth night, running a hose over equipment that was already clean an hour ago.
"You're going to wear a hole in that steel."
"Making sure it's ready for tomorrow."
"It was ready two hours ago. So were you, up until you weren't." He leans against the doorframe, arms crossed, watching me with the particular patience of a man who's had this exact conversation with me before and isn't in a hurry to have it badly again. "Talk to me."
"Nothing to talk about. Case is closed, Jenna's got her kids, everybody's safe."
"Everybody except you, apparently." He lets that sit a second. "You've had that same look since the hearing. Like you're running numbers you're pretty sure you already know the ending of."
"I'm not doing math."
"You're always doing math, Rafe. It's your whole personality." He shakes his head, not unkindly. "What's the number this time?"
I don't answer right away, and that's answer enough for both of us.
"A lawyer stood up in front of a judge and made a case for exactly what I've always been afraid I am," I say finally, coiling the hose slower than it needs.
"Unstable. A liability. The kind of variable you contain and account for so it doesn't hurt the people standing too close to it.
And the worst part is he wasn't lying. He was just saying it out loud in a room where it counted. "
"You won, Rafe. The judge didn't believe a word of it."
"The judge doesn't have to raise those kids. I do, or I would, if I stay in this long enough to actually become their problem instead of just their mother's."
"Listen to yourself." Gunny's voice sharpens, the patience finally running out.
"You're describing a man who fixes woodstoves and drives eleven miles at midnight and got up in that courtroom's gallery every single day even after his own lawyer told him to disappear.
That's not a liability. That's the opposite of one. "
"That's not what a stranger in a robe sees on paper."
"Then stop building your whole life around what looks good on paper and start building it around what's actually true.
" He steps closer, and for once there's no joke waiting behind his eyes.
"I've watched you do this twice before. Different reasons, same ending.
You decide you're the danger, and you remove yourself before anybody can prove you wrong.
It's not caution. It's cowardice, and you don't get to call it duty anymore. "
The word lands harder than he probably means it to, or exactly as hard as he means it to. I can't tell which anymore.
"I'm trying to protect them."
"You're trying to protect yourself from finding out what happens if you stay and it still goes wrong.
There's a difference, and some part of you knows it.
" He straightens up, done for tonight, already reaching for his jacket.
"Whatever you're about to do, don't do it tonight.
Sleep on it first. Just once, do the smart thing instead of the fast one. "
I don't answer that either, and he doesn't wait around for me to.
I stay in the brewhouse another hour after he leaves, running the same argument in circles until it stops sounding like fear and starts sounding, in my own head, like sense.
Jenna and the twins have a real shot now, a clean shot, custody settled and Derek boxed into a corner he has to behave inside of.
The one variable left in that equation that isn't settled, that isn't safe, that could still blow the whole thing back open with one bad night or one wrong headline, is me.
It's not dramatic to remove a variable like that.
It's just math, the kind I've been running my whole life, the kind that's kept people alive when I trusted it and gotten someone hurt the one time I didn't.
By the time I get in the truck, I've stopped calling it fear at all. I've dressed it up as responsibility, the same uniform Gunny just told me I don't get to wear anymore, and it fits so well I don't notice I'm wearing it until I'm already turning up her gravel drive.
Her porch light is already burning when I turn up the drive, same as it's been every night I've come here, and I stay behind the wheel a while before I make myself climb out, running through a version of this conversation that sounds clean and reasonable in my head and already knowing it won't sound like either one out loud.
Jenna opens the door before I knock, relief still fresh on her face from four days of finally being able to breathe, and something in my chest cracks at the sight of it, the specific unguarded happiness of a woman who has no idea what's about to happen on her own porch.
"Hey." She reaches for my hand, and I let her take it, because I haven't fully committed to not being touched yet. "I wasn't expecting you tonight."
"I know. I should've called."
"You're here now. That's better." She studies my face, and whatever she finds there makes her smile falter by degrees. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong. I've just been thinking."
"That's usually when something's wrong." She doesn't let go of my hand yet, like she can keep whatever this is from happening as long as she's still holding on. "Thinking about what?"
"About us. About what happens next, now that the case is over."
"I thought what happens next is the good part." Her voice stays light, but there's an edge underneath it now, the same instinct that's kept her alive around men who talk in circles before they say the actual thing. "Rafe, whatever this is, just say it."
"I think we should slow down."
The words come out flatter than I mean them to, stripped of everything that got me here, all the math and the fear and Bennett's voice and Gunny's warning, none of it making the trip from my head to my mouth, just five words delivered like an order I've already decided isn't up for negotiation.
"Slow down." She repeats it like she's checking the translation, like the words might mean something different the second time. "What does that mean, exactly?"
"It means I've had a lot of time to think since the hearing, and I don't think it's fair to you or the twins for me to keep being a variable in a case that's finally settled."
"A variable." Something in her face goes very still, very careful, the exact expression she wore the first few weeks I knew her, before she let herself trust any of this. "That's what I am to you right now."
"That's not what I meant."
"Then tell me what you meant, because from where I'm standing it sounds like a man who just won everything deciding the smartest move is to walk away from the one thing that isn't legally required to keep."
She isn't wrong, and I don't have anything true to say that contradicts her, so I don't say anything at all.
"Say something, Rafe."
"I don't have anything else."
"You have plenty else. You're choosing not to say it.
" Her voice catches right at the end, just slightly, and it costs her something to keep standing there instead of stepping back inside and shutting the door on all of it.
"Five months. Five months of you showing me exactly who you are, and now you're standing on my porch reciting a speech that sounds like it came out of a legal file instead of your own mouth. "
"Maybe that's the problem. Maybe I've spent so long being useful to everybody else's file that I don't know how to be anything else."
"That's not an answer. That's a deflection with better posture."
I don't have a rebuttal for that either, mostly because it's true, and standing here failing to argue with the truth feels like the last honest thing I've got left to offer her tonight.
"I should go."
"Of course you should." She lets go of my hand first this time, and the absence of it is colder than the actual air.
"Because that's what you do, isn't it? The second something gets real enough to actually cost you something, you retreat.
You did it after the kiss, that whole storm, and it took you four days to find your way back to me.
And now you're doing it after we won, which somehow might be the worst timing of the two. "
"I'm not retreating. I'm being responsible."
"You keep calling it that. It doesn't make it true." Her arms come up, wrapped around herself against a cold that isn't only the weather. "Responsible would be staying and telling me the truth about what's actually scaring you. This is just leaving with better vocabulary."
There's nothing left in me that isn't either a lie or a wound, so I turn instead, boots loud on the porch boards, and start down the steps into a night that's gotten considerably colder in the last ten minutes.
"Rafe."
I stop, one hand on the truck door, and don't turn around, because turning around means seeing her face, and I've already decided I can't survive that twice in one night.
"We should slow down," I say again, like repeating it might make it sound less like the exact thing Gunny warned me not to do an hour ago.
I offer nothing else behind it, no explanation that would actually hold up, no version of the truth that isn't dressed in strategy.
Just the five words and the sound of my own boots crossing the last few feet of her gravel drive.
I don't look back at the porch light before I pull away.
I don't have to. I already know it's still on, burning for a version of tonight that isn't the one I just built.
Somewhere behind me, five months of trust come apart in under ten minutes, quiet and total, the way I've always been best at ending things.