42. Rafe
RAFE
It's been three days since Jenna stood in my brewhouse and took the last of my excuses apart with six words, and I still haven't found anything to put in their place.
I close the taproom two hours early, send Wren and Marcus home with full pay and no explanation, because there isn't a version of the truth that fits in the time it takes to hand somebody their coat.
Gunny's out on a delivery run he insisted on taking himself, which means the building's entirely mine for once, dark except for the pilot lights on the kettle and the one bulb over the desk I haven't turned on.
I don't reach for the legal pad. That's new.
Three days ago I would have opened it out of pure reflex, built a column of problems and another of solutions, made the whole thing look manageable by turning it into paperwork.
Tonight the pad just sits there, closed, because I've finally run out of the energy it takes to pretend a list would help.
Biscuit finds me on the floor of the brewhouse, back against the cold steel of Tank Two, and settles his whole enormous head into my lap like he's been waiting all day for permission.
I scratch behind his ears without really registering that I'm doing it, and somewhere in the dark I start running Jenna's words again, the way I have every few minutes since she said them.
The building smells the way it always does after close, malt and cold steel and the faint sweetness of the last batch still working itself out in the tanks, a smell I used to find steadying.
Tonight it just feels like proof of how good I am at building things that don't ask anything of me.
Grain and yeast and water do exactly what you tell them to if you get the math right.
They don't leave. They don't look at you across a porch and ask you to be honest. I built an entire life out of variables I could control because I stopped trusting myself with the ones I couldn't, and somewhere along the way that started looking like peace instead of what it actually was.
You're not protecting us. You're protecting yourself.
I've tried arguing with it a hundred different ways since she walked out of here, built whole cases in my head about duty and liability and what's actually safest for two kids who've already survived one man who couldn't be trusted to stay steady.
None of the arguments hold. They fall apart the same place every time, right where she left them standing, because she wasn't wrong.
She was just the first person willing to say it to my face instead of around it.
My phone rings a little before six, and I almost let it go, until I see Marisol's name on the screen and something in me won't let it ring a third time.
"Hey." I clear my throat, work to get my voice into something closer to normal. "Everything okay? Mateo good?"
"Mateo's fine. He's currently trying to convince me a dog would fix all of his problems, so you can imagine how my afternoon's going." She pauses, and the warmth underneath the words shifts into something more careful. "I'm calling about you, actually."
"I'm fine."
"You said that too fast for it to be true.
I've gotten good at hearing the difference.
" She pauses again, longer this time, like she's deciding how much ground to cover before I can find a door to close.
"Gunny called me last week. Said the custody thing settled, that you and Jenna won.
He also said you looked like a man who'd just lost, not won, and that struck him enough to mention it to me. "
"Small towns and their phone trees."
"Don't do that. Don't turn this into a joke so I stop asking." Her voice sharpens, gentle but immovable, the same tone she used the day I stood on her porch four full minutes before I could knock. "What happened, Rafe?"
I tell her. Not all of it, not the whole ugly shape of the last two weeks, but enough, the hearing and the win and the porch and the five words I offered Jenna instead of an actual reason.
Marisol listens without interrupting, the kind of listening that costs something, and when I finally run out of words she lets the silence sit for a second before she answers.
"So you had the thing you've been circling for months, and the second you got it, you threw it away before it could throw you away first."
"That's a brutal way to put it."
"It's an accurate way to put it. I'm allowed both." I hear something shift on her end, a chair, a door, the ordinary sounds of a house that still holds a kid and a life in it. "Can I tell you something about my brother?"
"Always."
"Danny hated waste. Hated it more than almost anything.
He'd rather eat a bad meal than throw out food that was still good, drove me crazy about it our whole childhood.
" She laughs, small and sad around the edges.
"You are the best thing that survived him, Rafe.
Not the guilt. Not the money you've been sending me for six years like it settles some account.
You. And right now you're standing over the one good thing that came out of all of this, deciding it's better to waste it than risk losing it later.
He would be furious with you. Actually furious, not the polite kind. "
"I don't know how to just stop being scared of it."
"Nobody's asking you to stop being scared.
I'm asking you to stop letting scared make your decisions for you.
" Her voice softens again, steady under the words.
"You've spent six years treating survival like a debt you owe somebody.
You already paid it, Rafe. Danny forgave you the second it happened, if he ever even blamed you at all, which I don't think he did.
The only person still sending you the bill is you. "
I don't have a real answer for that, just static, so I sit with it instead, phone pressed to my ear, Biscuit's weight warm against my leg.
"I should let you go," Marisol says eventually, gentle. "Just promise me you'll think about what I said instead of filing it away with everything else you don't look at."
"I promise."
"Good. Mateo says hi, by the way. He drew you something. I'll mail it, and you'll pretend you don't cry a little when it shows up, and I won't call you on it."
"Deal."
She hangs up, and the brewhouse goes quiet again, quieter than before somehow, her words still settling into something in me that hasn't finished shifting yet.
I'm still sitting on the floor an hour later when the side door bangs open hard enough to rattle the hinges, and Gunny walks in already talking, keys still in his hand, jacket half off one shoulder.
"You didn't answer your phone. Three times."
"I was on with Marisol."
"Good, because I've got things to say and I'd rather only say them once.
" He drops his jacket over a stool and crosses the room, close enough that I have to actually look up at him, Biscuit lifting his head off my lap just long enough to register the new arrival before deciding Gunny's not worth moving for.
"You want to explain to me why half this town keeps stopping me on the street to ask if you're all right, and I don't have a single decent answer for any of them? "
"It's not a pattern."
"It is exactly a pattern, and you know it, because I've watched you run it twice before and now I'm watching you run it a third time in slow motion, like maybe if you do it carefully enough this time it won't count.
" He crouches down so we're closer to level, and there's none of the usual joke waiting behind his eyes tonight.
"Talk to me. For real this time. Not the version where you tell me you're fine and I pretend to believe it so we can both go home. "
"I don't know what you want me to say."
"Stop performing and say the actual thing.
Not the speech about variables. Not the one about protecting people.
The real one, underneath all of it." He doesn't move, doesn't blink, just waits, the same patient, immovable weight he's brought to every hard conversation we've had in six years of knowing each other.
"What are you actually scared of, Rafe?"
"I told you. I'm scared of being the thing that goes wrong for them."
"That's the story. I asked for the truth.
" His voice doesn't rise, but it doesn't need to, cutting cleaner than shouting ever could.
"You've handled real threats your whole life.
Derek. Combat. A courtroom full of people trying to prove you're unstable.
None of that broke you. You didn't run from any of it.
So it's not Derek keeping you up at night, and it's not the judge. What is it?"
I open my mouth to give him the same answer again, the responsible one, the one that's held up in every version of this argument I've had with myself for two weeks straight, and it just doesn't come.
Whatever's been locked down in me since the hearing finally gives way, all at once, no warning before it happens.
"I'm scared of getting it," I say, my voice cracking in a way I don't recognize.
"All of it. Jenna, the twins, the whole life I never let myself plan for.
I'm scared of actually having it, actually keeping it long enough to build something real, and then losing it anyway, the same way I lost Danny.
I didn't see that coming either. I had him, and then I didn't, in about four seconds, and I've spent six years making sure I never stood close enough to anything to lose it that fast again. "
Gunny doesn't say anything for a second, just lets it sit in the room the way Marisol let my silence sit on the phone, giving it the weight it's earned instead of rushing to patch it over.
"There it is," he says finally, quiet now. "That's the actual thing."
"Saying it doesn't fix it."
"No. But you've been carrying it alone for six years, and it just got a little lighter the second you said it out loud in front of somebody who isn't going anywhere.
" He straightens up, offers me a hand, and pulls me to my feet with more force than I'm expecting, like he's trying to physically yank me out of the last two weeks.
"You can't protect yourself from losing people by refusing to have them in the first place, Rafe.
That's not safety. That's just losing them slower, on purpose, so it doesn't catch you off guard. "
"When did you get so good at this?"
"I've had a lot of practice watching you almost ruin your own life. Consider it professional development." The joke's back in his voice now, but there's something steadier underneath it, real relief, like he's been hoping for weeks that I'd finally say it. "So what are you going to do about it?"
I look down at Biscuit, who's already lost interest in both of us and gone back to sleep against the tank, and then at the legal pad still closed on the desk, no list started, no column of problems waiting to be solved with a pen.
For two weeks I've been running the same threat assessment on my own life, cataloging every way it could go wrong, treating Jenna and the twins like a risk to be managed instead of a family to be lived in.
It's the wrong question. It's been the wrong question since the day I met her.
I grab my truck keys off the peg by the door.
"Rafe."
"I'm going," I say, already moving, already done running numbers on what could go wrong. For the first time in two weeks, in longer than that if I'm honest, I stop asking what I'm afraid of losing and ask the only question that actually matters.
What do I want?
I want her. I want all four of them, loud and complicated and permanent, every version of a future I've spent six years convincing myself I wasn't allowed to reach for.
Gunny's still talking behind me, something about taking my own truck instead of his, and I barely hear him, already out the door and into the cold, already driving toward the only answer that's ever mattered.