by Claire Adams
“That’s great,” Harper said, but I could tell she sounded distracted.
“What’s up with you?” I asked. “Are you working on something?”
“I just have this article that I’m trying to get done before someone else beats us to it,” she sighed. “Sorry. I really do want to chat; it’s just been a hectic day.”
“No problem,” I said immediately. “You get that article done. I can’t wait to read it.”
“Thanks,” Harper said. “Talk soon, okay?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said, hanging up the phone. I had a moment of second-guessing. But Harper was busy; I knew that. I knew what I was signing up for. I couldn’t start panicking about the state of our relationship already. If she didn’t actually want to be in a relationship with me, if she was having second thoughts, I had to trust that she would come right out and say so.
Anyway, I was in too good a mood to let it get to me. I immediately dialed George’s number. “Hey, do you have a minute?” I asked. “I was doing some thinking. What if we also integrated service dogs into our new program?”
I started explaining about Sadie and Vixen, and about how it seemed like a lot of the things that Vixen had been trained to do were things that we already knew how to train. George liked the idea, and we started brainstorming. It felt good, I realized, to have a project to give myself over to again. It felt like I had a purpose again.
I breathed out a sigh of relief. Hopefully, that was the end of feeling adrift. Hopefully, from now on, everything would be good.
17
Harper
By the time Sunday afternoon rolled around, I was exhausted. I practically collapsed onto Mom’s couch, groaning as the soft cushions molded to my body. “That’s it; I’m never moving again,” I swore. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure how I had survived the drive out to Winchester. Or really why I had bothered. Mom was perfectly capable of taking care of Ava for another night, and she would have been more than happy to do so.
Especially seeing as I was currently in no state to take care of myself, let alone my daughter.
But I’d felt guilty for leaving Ava with her for two nights already. I hadn’t really been able to help the one the previous night; I’d been swamped with work, and not the kind that I could have a three-year-old trailing after me for either. But the night before, that had been all on me. I probably shouldn’t have dumped Ava on Mom just so that I could get laid that, though I really didn’t want to change the way that night had ended, either.
Ava patted my head, smiling at me, and it was all I could do to grin wearily back at her. She was perfectly happy that her sleepover at Grammie’s had ended up being a two-night stay when a big story had come through. I knew that my editor put me on it as thanks for doing the piece on Ace, and I wanted it to be perfect, but I’d been going for nearly twenty hours straight now, and I was pretty much dead on my feet.
But all Ava knew was that she’d gotten to stay at Grammie’s for two nights, play with all her special toys, bake chocolate chip cookies, and then see her mama at the end of it all. It was sweet thinking of the innocent way she must view the world.
I wished things could be that uncomplicated for me. Especially where Ace was concerned. I’d been so busy, and I was so exhausted. But he’d been there in the back of my mind ever since Friday night.
Or longer, truthfully. But I didn’t want to think about how long I’d been thinking about him. It was all well and good now that he was back in my life, but I had to wonder if maybe the reason I’d never dated anyone after Ava was born was more to do with the fact that I’d always been holding out hope that one day, eventually, I would make contact with Ace again and he would want to be with us, a beautiful little family.
Mom brought in some tea and a sandwich. I wolfed the sandwich down in what felt like two bites, not having realized how hungry I was. I couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten, though, so I supposed it made sense.
“You need to start taking better care of yourself, Mama,” Mom said disapprovingly, pulling Ava into her lap and starting to braid the girl’s hair.
“I know, I know,” I said, rolling my eyes and taking a sip of my tea, letting the warmth flow through my body. “It was an exciting story, though.”
“What’s it about?” Mom asked.
“The kidnapping of this woman and her son.” I shook my head. “God, some of the details are so awful. But the police found them, in the end, and it was a good ending. They’re going to be okay.” I paused. “But it does make me want to hug Miss Ava here and never let her go.”
Ava squirmed as I reached over and tickled her, her face breaking out into the most adorable grin.
“I thought you weren’t taking stories like that anymore,” Mom said. “You were sticking mostly to the smaller stories.”
“Not because I want to,” I said, shaking my head. “That’s just what they’ve been giving me lately. Most of the best stories go to their full-time staff.”
“Have you thought about going back to work for them full-time?” Mom asked curiously. “I mean, obviously you couldn’t disappear to the Middle East for another six months or anything like that—you have a family now. But what’s your long-term plan with them?”
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. The horrible truth was that it felt like my career had really been going somewhere before I’d found out that I was pregnant with Ava, and then it had just sort of stalled. I’d never recovered. Not that I regretted having Ava. I wouldn’t trade one day with her for any sort of article lead. But at the same time, this wasn’t what I would ever have expected.
Again, it made me wonder about Ace. Maybe he had changed too, just as much as I had. Or was that just wishful thinking?
“How was your date the other night?” Mom asked suddenly.
I gave her a guilty look. “What date?” I asked, trying to sound innocent. But I knew she wasn’t buying it.
“Oh come on. You were wearing makeup when you dropped Ava off. You never wear makeup anymore.” She said it matter-of-factly, and I had to admit that she was right.
I shrugged. “It was good.” I couldn’t help the smile that spread across my face. “It was really good, actually.” The date itself had been good. And the rest of the night had been the cherry on top of it all. I liked thinking of Ace as my boyfriend now. I felt lucky to call him that. Even if I didn’t know what it meant for either of our futures.
What I’d secretly liked the most was that Ace had called me, the day after. I’d been busy, and I hadn’t really been able to appreciate it at the time, but it had been good to hear his voice. To hear that he wasn’t having second thoughts about us and that he wanted to tell me about his day. Speaking of which, I made a mental note to call him back once I left Mom’s. I owed him a chat, and maybe we could set up our next date.
Mom wasn’t done with me yet, though. “Was it the guy from the TV?” she asked pointedly. “The one?” She was staring at Ava when she said it, her meaning obvious, even if I hadn’t already gathered it from her words. I wanted to toss out some flippant reply about how, no, I wasn’t dating the dude on the Weather Channel. But instead, I just shrugged.
“Yeah, it was him,” I told her.
Mom tsked. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” she said.
“I don’t,” I admitted. “But I can’t seem to stop myself.”
“Did you at least tell him?” Mom asked sharply.
“Not yet,” I said defensively. I knew she thought I should have already told Ace that Ava was his. As far as she was concerned, I should have told him about her before she was ever even born. But I wanted to do things a different way. And I was old enough not to have to feel like she was judging me over it.
I shrugged. “I’m going to tell him. Just not yet. We’re taking things slow.”
“Taking things slow,” Mom said, snorting derisively to show what she thought about that. She lifted Ava off her lap and sat her next to me on the couch, shaking her head as s
he moved back into the kitchen, taking my empty plate with her. I could hear her scrubbing away in the sink back there, and I sighed.
Ava giggled. “Grammie’s mad,” she said, clearly not understanding the gravity of the situation.
But to be honest, I didn’t really care that Mom was mad at me. It wasn’t her life, and it wasn’t her decision. I didn’t want to scare Ace away before we even had a chance to figure out what we might have together. Even if in the end, he decided that it was all too much and that he wasn’t interested in it, even if he left me broken and crying, I needed to see this through.
And I needed to do things in my own way.
Ava crawled into my lap, curling up against my chest. “Nap time?” she asked.
I laughed. If only she could possibly understand how badly I needed a nap right then. “Yeah, kiddo,” I said, turning sideways on the couch and kicking my feet up, still keeping her pressed close to me. “It’s nap time.” I closed my eyes and was dead asleep within minutes.
18
Ace
I listened to yet another message from Harper on my phone, smiling as she talked about her busy schedule for the day. Things had been hectic on both of our ends since Friday, and now we had resorted to playing phone tag. But I still looked forward to every one of her messages. I just liked hearing her voice.
I called her back and got her voicemail again. “Hey, I know you’re busy today, but I just wanted to say hey and let you know that I was thinking about you,” I said. It was cheesy. Not the usual sort of thing that I would say to someone. But it was true. “Anyway, about to head in to examine all the chaos in my head with my shrink. And then back to work for the afternoon. Talk to you soon, I hope. Bye.”
I hung up the phone and took a deep breath, staring up at my therapist’s office building for a moment. I was going more regularly now. I really wanted to figure out why I couldn’t seem to let go of Harper. Even the tricks I’d always used to calm the noise in my head, the punching bag, and the bike rides and running, none of that seemed to help. I was always thinking about her, wondering what she was up to at the moment or if she was thinking about me.
It was starting to get to the point where I accepted that I had a problem. I knew that the crazy had been there right from the start, from when I’d biked down her block four times just hoping to catch a glimpse of her. Or really, since before that. Since I’d refused to talk to any other reporter at the Globe.
Deep down, I knew that nothing good could come of this. But it was like watching a slow-moving car crash on a movie theater screen: I just couldn’t seem to avert my eyes, and there was nothing I could do to make the outcome any different, no matter what I might try.
I shook my head and headed inside.
For a moment, while I sat idly in the waiting room, I wondered what Harper would say if she knew how much I talked about her there with my therapist. I usually steered clear of telling anyone that I was in therapy. Even though I knew it was perfectly normal in this day and age, I felt like I always got a look of pity when people found out that I needed to have my head examined on a regular basis. And as much as I wanted to dismiss it entirely, it felt like it was helping. Like maybe, after enough of these visits, we might get somewhere or figure out something important about me.
I did appreciate that Nancy never said anything about PTSD to me, not after that first session when I’d insisted that it wasn’t PTSD I was dealing with. She let me talk about whatever I needed to talk about, without putting labels on things. That was just what I needed.
“I want to talk to you today about your childhood,” Nancy said as she shut the door behind me.
I grimaced. That was the last thing that I wanted to talk to her about, but I knew that we had been building toward that. Every time I brought up Harper, I brought up Ava and my mixed feelings toward children.
“I know, I know,” Nancy said, holding up both of her hands. “As always, if there’s anything that you really don’t want to discuss, we can table those things. But I can tell that you’ve been avoiding talking about it, and I also can tell that it’s the last obstacle that you’ve put up. In order to figure out why Harper is so important to you, you need to figure out what you’re feeling toward her and what you’re trying to keep buried.”
I wanted to tell her that I wasn’t going to talk about it. My shitty past had nothing to do with how I felt about Harper. In fact, part of why I liked Harper so much was because she didn’t ask me about my past. She took us all at face value when she was over there in Kuwait. I had really appreciated that.
But I also knew that I needed to face my past, especially if I was going to work through the tangled emotions I had for Ava.
She wasn’t even my kid, but somehow, I was terrified about screwing up her life. Harper would take care of that baby over anything else, though. If I really trusted Harper, which I did, then I needed to trust that she wouldn’t let me do anything terrible to her daughter.
I shook my head and stared down at the exercise that Nancy handed me. Write down three good things from my childhood. I blew out a noisy breath. “That’s a hard one,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t think there’s any good stuff there.”
“Troubled family life?” Nancy asked, raising an eyebrow at me.
“You could say that,” I said sourly, thinking back to my dad. I shrugged. “I guess the first good thing was getting put into the foster care system. Not that there’s anything good about the foster care system, but at least I didn’t have to live with my dad anymore.”
Nancy nodded slowly. “Then let’s narrow it down a little further,” she said. “Why don’t you try to write down three positive things from your time in the foster care system. How long was it?”
“A couple years,” I told her. “I was emancipated at seventeen and graduated high school. Joined the military because what the hell else was I going to do with my life.” I frowned down at the paper, anxiously tapping my pencil against the edge of the desk. “Does it have to be three things?” I asked.
“However many you can think of,” Nancy said generously. “I just want you to try and think of anything good that happened to you.”
“Right,” I muttered, thinking back.
They were memories that I didn’t normally like to delve into, although they were always there, behind everything else. Part of the background noise that I usually needed to silence with repetition and physical exertion.
The three separate homes were crap. I had a hard time thinking of a single good thing that had happened to me in any of those places. Oh, it was better than being back with my dad, don’t get me wrong. But between houses that were bursting at the seams with more kids than your local zoo and houses where people just pitied me, where they walked on eggshells around me like I was some bomb that might go off at any time, it was just rough. I’d been glad to get out of the system and really get to start my life.
It was what had made me shoot through the ranks in the military, too. I didn’t have anywhere else to go, nothing else to do with my life. I needed the direction that it gave me, and I was desperate not to lose that. I was desperate, especially in those first years, not to screw up.
I had to wonder, in retrospect, if maybe a little bit of that desperation was why I hadn’t gone back to say goodbye to Harper when I’d found out we were headed out on a mission. If they’d kicked me out, I wasn’t sure what I’d do with myself.
But that was neither here nor there now. I tried to concentrate on the task that Nancy had given me. “There was one girl in my senior year, right after I aged out of the foster care system, who was nice to me,” I told her. “Does that count, if it was after I was out of the foster care system?”
“That’s all right,” Nancy said encouragingly. “I want you to really think about her. You don’t have to tell me about her, just think about her.”
Wasn’t that something?
When I really thought about her, Claire, I realized that Harper reminded me a lot of he
r, in both looks and personality. Could this be why I was having a hard time forgetting about Harper? Probably. I just expected her to be full of that warmth and comfort and kindness. She was vivacious and caring.
She reminded me of Claire.
It was so obvious, now, that I didn’t know why it had taken me so long to notice. I also didn’t know how Nancy had managed to hit on it so quickly. I looked at the therapist in a new light. Maybe we really were working toward something here.
The only trouble was, even if I recognized that Harper wasn’t Claire, that I didn’t have to fixate on her to try and make amends with the other girl that I’d left behind years ago now, it didn’t actually solve anything. I couldn’t just snap my fingers and forget all about Harper, and I definitely was nowhere closer to figuring out what to do about my situation with Ava.
I left my therapy session that day with a lot to think about but still no answers. And I was starting to feel frustrated.
19
Harper
On Thursday, I finally got a spare minute to call Ace back. It had been one of the longer weeks of my life, and I was totally spent. All I really wanted was to curl up on the couch with him and order in Chinese food. We’d put on a silly cartoon movie for Ava to watch, as she and I just cuddled.
Instead, I was on my way to yet another interview, so that that night I could write an article about the new head of pediatric oncology at the local hospital. It wasn’t exactly riveting. And it meant commuting clear across the city to get to the hospital and then making the long trip back. Normally, that wouldn’t be an issue, but my car had started making some funny noises, and I was stuck on the T until I got it back from the mechanic.
“Where are you?” Ace asked when he answered. “It sounds like you’re in a tunnel.”