47. Jenna
JENNA
Seven weeks is long enough that I eventually stop counting them, and I notice the exact morning it happens, which feels like its own small proof of something.
It isn't one grand gesture that gets me there.
It's smaller than that, and slower, and somehow more convincing because of it.
Rafe shows up for every pickup ten minutes early instead of on time now, parked at the curb reading something on his phone like there's nowhere else he'd rather be.
He texts before he's running late, not after, a habit so small I almost miss it the first few times, until I realize I've stopped bracing every time my phone buzzes with his name on it.
He remembers that Eli needs the red water bottle, not the blue one, because the blue one leaks.
He remembers Josie's allergy list without being handed it twice.
They're small things, ordinary things, exactly the kind Derek never once bothered to hold onto, because he never had to prove anything to anyone who might actually leave.
One evening in the third week, my car won't start in the brewery lot, and instead of turning it into a production, Rafe just pops the hood, finds the loose connection in about ninety seconds, and hands me my keys back like it never happened.
I stand there afterward longer than the moment requires, waiting for the catch, the favor he'll bring up later, the quiet tally I've learned to expect from men who do things for you.
It doesn't come. He's already walking back toward the taproom, calling over his shoulder that Gunny burned the pretzels again and somebody needs to intervene before the whole batch is a loss.
There's a night in the fourth week that sticks with me more than the rest. A storm knocks the power out just after dinner, and before I've even found the flashlight, my phone lights up with a text asking if we're okay, followed twenty minutes later by his truck in the driveway anyway, because texting wasn't enough proof for either of us yet.
He doesn't come in and make it a whole production.
He just sits on the porch steps with me until the lights flicker back on, Josie curled against his side under a blanket, Eli narrating the storm's progress like a weatherman with a flashlight for a microphone, and then he drives home again once he's sure we're settled, no lingering, no asking for credit.
By the fifth week I stop waiting for the catch entirely. By the sixth, I notice I've started leaving my phone face up on the counter again, screen unlocked, the way I used to before I learned better with Derek. Small as they are, they add up slower than I expect and faster than I'm ready for.
So when Rafe calls one morning and asks if the three of us are free that afternoon, no real explanation attached beyond "I made something, come see it," I don't hesitate the way I might have two months ago. I just ask what time.
"Whenever works. No pressure. I just want you all to see it before I lose my nerve."
"That's not ominous at all."
"It's a good kind of nervous. I promise." Something in his voice sounds almost young, open in a way I can count on one hand the number of times I've heard it, and it settles the last of my hesitation before I've fully registered deciding anything.
The twins take the drive out to the ranch as an opportunity to interrogate me the entire way, Josie leading the charge from the back seat with the relentless focus of a prosecutor who already suspects the verdict and just wants it confirmed out loud.
"Is it a puppy?"
"Not that I know of."
"Is it a bigger puppy? Like a whole grown dog?"
"Josie."
"I'm just asking questions. That's allowed." She subsides for exactly four seconds before trying a different angle. "Eli thinks it's boring, like a new fence or something."
"I didn't say boring," Eli says, with the wounded dignity of a boy who has been badly misquoted. "I said practical. Practical isn't the same as boring."
"It's the same as boring."
"It's not."
I let them argue it out the rest of the way, mostly because it's easier than admitting I have no idea what we're driving toward either, and some part of me likes not knowing, likes the particular quality of surprise that comes from trusting somebody enough to let them have one.
Rafe's waiting by the barn when we pull in, hands shoved in his jacket pockets, looking about as nervous as I've ever seen a grown man look while standing perfectly still.
Biscuit circles his legs twice before abandoning him entirely to come greet the twins, who abandon the car doors half open in their hurry to get their hands on him.
"You're not going to tell us what it is," I say, climbing out, reading the answer on his face before he gives it.
"Nope. Follow me."
He leads us past the brewhouse, past the row of hop bines just starting to climb their strings for the season, back toward the tree line where the ground slopes up gently into a stand of old cottonwoods I've walked past a dozen times without ever really looking at them.
And there, tucked between two of the biggest trunks, built solid and square and clearly meant to last, sits a treehouse.
It isn't fancy. That's the first thing I notice, and it's exactly right.
There's no gingerbread trim, no elaborate turret, just clean lines and good lumber and a set of stairs instead of a rope ladder, because of course he thought about how an eight-year-old actually climbs something safely.
A small window box under one window holds a scraggly row of marigolds that somebody clearly planted with more enthusiasm than skill.
And over the door, painted in careful, blocky letters that match the handwriting I already know from a hand-labeled beer bottle sitting in my cabinet at home, a sign reads THE WALSH-MONTGOMERY OUTPOST.
Nobody says anything for a second. Then Eli's moving, taking the stairs two at a time, and Josie's right behind him shrieking something about calling dibs on the good corner, and I'm left standing in the grass beside Rafe, staring up at a structure that clearly took him weeks to build in secret while also somehow running a brewery and showing up for every single pickup ten minutes early.
"You built this."
"Every board of it. Took me most of the last month and a half, working after close, some early mornings before you'd notice the truck was gone.
" He ducks his head, a little sheepish, watching the twins' feet thunder across the little platform above us.
"Gunny thinks I've lost my mind. He's not entirely wrong. "
"When did you have time for this?"
"Same way I make room for everything that actually matters. I just don't sleep much." He says it simply, no weight behind it, like it's just a fact and not the whole philosophy he's spent the last seven weeks rebuilding his life around.
We climb up after them, Rafe steadying the stairs with one hand even though they don't need it, and the inside turns out to be even more him than the outside.
A reading nook fills one corner, built around a cushion Maggie clearly had a hand in choosing.
Two small desks sit twin-sized and facing each other instead of a wall, so neither kid has to work with their back turned to the other.
A shelf holds exactly the right number of books for two eight-year-olds who fight over everything except which stories are worth keeping.
"There's two desks," Eli says, running a hand along the edge of his like he's checking the workmanship, already sounding grudgingly impressed. "So it's not just Josie's."
"It's everybody's. That was the whole point."
"Practical," Eli says, shooting his sister a look loaded with months of accumulated argument. Josie ignores him completely, too busy arranging herself in the reading nook like she's testing it for structural integrity, one leg thrown over the cushioned edge.
"I approve," she declares, arms crossed like a queen surveying new territory. "This is better than a puppy."
"I'll let the puppy know it lost," Rafe says, and Eli actually laughs, quick and surprised, like he wasn't expecting to.
Josie finds the bottle first, propped on the little shelf between the desks, plain glass except for a hand-lettered label taped around its middle.
"What's this one?"
Rafe crosses the small space and takes it from her gently, turning it so I can see the label properly. FAMILY RESERVE, it reads, in the same careful hand as the sign outside, and underneath it, smaller, four names: mine, his, Eli's, and Josie's.
"I brewed a batch and couldn't decide what to call it," he says, eyes down on the bottle like it might give him something to hold onto rather than meeting mine just yet. "Then I figured it out. It was never really about the beer."
"Rafe."
"I need to say this while I've got all three of you in one room, because I've spent too long saying important things to the wrong person or at the wrong time or not at all.
" He sets the bottle down, finally looks up, and there's nothing guarded left in his face, none of the old careful distance he used to keep even standing this close.
"I love you, Jenna. Not the careful version I let myself feel for months while I was busy convincing myself it was safer not to say it.
All of it. I love these two exactly as much, which I didn't think was possible until I met them, and I want to build an actual life with all three of you.
Not slow. Not scared. Not one more day of me running numbers on whether I deserve to stay when I already know the answer. "
"Rafe, I..."
"I'm not finished." He almost smiles, nerves and certainty tangled together in a way that undoes me faster than anything he's said yet.
"I don't have a ring in my pocket. This isn't that, not yet, though it's coming, and you should probably start bracing for it.
This is just me telling you, in front of the only two people whose vote actually outranks yours in this house, that I'm done being careful with something this good.
I want all of it. The mess, the noise, the two kids who still haven't decided whether this is boring or practical, all of it, for as long as you'll let me. "
"Yes."
The word's out of my mouth before he's even fully stopped talking, quick and certain, and it costs me less effort than it probably should, given seven weeks of proof stacked up behind it.
"You didn't let me finish the question."
"You didn't need to ask one. I already know what it was."
He laughs, low and disbelieving, like a man who built an entire treehouse and rehearsed a whole speech and still somehow underestimated how ready I already was, and then Eli and Josie are both talking at once, something about whether they get to help pick the ring, whether this means Rafe lives here now, whether Biscuit gets his own room, and none of it slows down long enough for anyone to actually answer.
Rafe pulls me in first, one arm circling my waist. Then the twins crash into us from both sides at once, four arms and two small bodies wedging themselves into a hug that has no business fitting on a treehouse ladder and somehow does anyway.
We're all laughing and half falling, holding on tight enough that nobody actually tips over the edge.
Below us, Biscuit barks once at the commotion and then gives up entirely, flopping down in the grass to wait us out, and above us the cottonwood leaves catch the afternoon light and throw moving shadows across a sign that already looks like it's been there for years instead of weeks.
It isn't the proposal. Not yet. But standing on that ladder with all four of us tangled together and a bottle with our four names on it waiting up on that shelf, I already know exactly what my answer's going to be when he finally asks the real question, and I don't need a ring to prove it.