“Who is she?” Stone said, frowning. “I know I recognize her, but I’m trying to place her.” He grinned crookedly. “You know that stupid maddening thing where you can’t figure out how you know a person when you see them outside of the context that you normally see them in?”
“Yeah,” I said, frowning as well. “You didn’t happen to pass through Kuwait ever, did you? She was there at our base for about five, six months as an overseas reporter. That was maybe four years ago.”
“Huh,” Stone said. But he shook his head. “I was never there. And I don’t recognize her as a journalist.”
I started to wonder if he really recognized her at all or if he was mixing her up with someone else. But then, he snapped his fingers. “Wait, I know who she is. Yeah, she lives pretty close to here. I’ve gone by her house a few times and seen her outside with her daughter. You know her from Kuwait? What a crazy small world, huh?” He went to the fridge and grabbed an energy drink and then made his way into the gym to work out, oblivious to my reaction.
I was frozen in place at the table. With her daughter? Had I heard him right?
I felt my heart sink. If she had a daughter, then there must be a man. A husband, probably. She was a nice girl, not the type to get pregnant and have a baby out of wedlock. Not that I really knew her.
I wanted to ask Stone more about her. Where exactly did she live, and how old was the baby? She hadn’t been in a relationship when she’d come over to Kuwait, as far as I knew, so I figured the kid had to be maybe two years old at the most. That gave her time to come back home, find a guy, get married, and have a kid.
It was weird to think that it had been so long. With the way that I remembered her, it seemed impossible that it had been that amount of time. But time always seemed a little strange when I had been deployed. Things blurred together.
I frowned. Shit. That must be why she didn’t want me to be around. Now I felt like an ass for forcing her to do the interview with me. I’d really thought that if I showed her I was going to be persistent, that I was going to be there, then I could get her to at least grab drinks or dinner with me. I’d really thought that we could reconnect and pick up where we’d left off.
I felt a strange sense of loss, and it wasn’t just because I wasn’t going to get to have sex with her again. I pushed it down. I was sure this stupid feeling was why the guys at the group had told me not to give in to those baser needs. This was one more feeling I had to deal with, and I was already dealing with so much strangeness with the reintegration process.
I kept thinking about what Stone had said, that she lived near here. I was tempted to hop on my bike and cruise around the neighborhood looking for her. But that was crazy. There was no knowing if I’d actually even see her, and even if I did, what was I going to say? She’d been over to my place; she knew how close we lived to each other.
And she wanted nothing to do with me. I had to let her go.
I hated that Stone was using the gym equipment right now. I really wanted to go a few rounds with the punching bag, to get the noise in my head down to a dull roar again. But I didn’t want to get in his way or throw off his own rhythm. I just had to deal with this.
I was Harper’s past. That was all. There was no future for us.
For some reason, I didn’t like that. Not that I’d ever been the family and kids kind of guy. I didn’t know what I’d even wanted with Harper. Sex. A friend. Not a relationship, though. I should be happy that she’d found someone who could give her everything she deserved.
I had a million questions, more now than before. But I knew she wasn’t going to give me the time of day. She wasn’t going to answer them.
For a moment, I looked guiltily at my phone. But there hadn’t been any information on the internet about her kid, I didn’t think. I was tempted to look again.
Before I could, my phone rang. I picked it up automatically. “Hello?”
“Hi, is this Ace Bradley? This is Connie Winters with…”
I was still thinking about Harper. About Harper and her kid. Her daughter. Did her daughter have the same coffee-colored skin, the same curly hair? Those bewitching dark eyes? Did she have her laugh, her brains? For some reason, even though I’d never been intere
sted in kids before, I suddenly wanted to know all about Harper’s daughter.
I didn’t even know the girl’s name.
I was so distracted that I found myself agreeing to do an interview, live, with the local news. That was the only excuse I could come up with, looking back. Because I damn sure wouldn’t have agreed to it if my mind hadn’t been clouded. The only reason I’d agreed to do the interview with the Globe was as an excuse to see Harper.
I didn’t need my five minutes of fame. Especially not for something I had just done automatically because I’d been trained to take out the bad guys.
But somehow, I found myself agreeing to be at the studio the following morning, stupidly early, so that I could tell the world, or at least the greater Massachusetts area, all about the day in the café where I stopped a guy from stealing, what, fifty bucks?
I rolled my eyes, disgusted with myself. Stone was still working away in the gym, so I threw on my running shoes and headed out to pound away at the asphalt. I purposefully headed out of our neighborhood as quickly as I could.
9
Harper
On Saturday morning, I loaded up Ava into the back seat of my car and headed out to Mom’s place. She lived out in Winchester, a little bit of a drive outside the city, but she claimed she liked the peace and quiet, and she could still take the train in whenever she wanted to come in to Boston proper.
Mom and I hadn’t really gotten along very well from the time I was a teenager until really around the time that Ava was born. She was a retired policewoman and cranky as all get out, but she thought Ava was the best thing in the world, and all her hard edges went away when she was around her granddaughter.