“I have to tell you something,” I finally blurted out.
But at the same time, Ace finally opened his mouth, too: “Is Ava mine?”
I froze, staring at him. I hadn’t expected him to figure it out on his own, but apparently, he had. I wanted to believe that if he was still here, sitting across from me, then maybe he wouldn’t be so upset that I hadn’t told him. Maybe he wouldn’t storm out.
But maybe he planned to fight me for custody of her. That was still an option. I swallowed hard, trying to figure out how to explain.
30
Ace
I didn’t know what I expected Harper’s reaction to be. To be honest, I hadn’t really expected her to deny it. I guess deep down, I kind of already knew the answer: Ava really was mine. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. The timing was just too perfect, and I wasn’t the only person who thought that she looked like me.
I hadn’t even been the first person to realize that she looked like me. I still wondered how I had missed it. Why it had taken me so long to connect the dots. It made so much sense.
I had been thinking of it all week. Wondering what all of it meant. Imagining a future together with Harper as my wife, raising our daughter Ava together. It was strange to think about still. It was the kind of life that I had never really imagined for myself. In fact, it was the kind of life that I’d thought I wouldn’t want.
But I kept thinking back to the other night, sipping soup together in Harper’s kitchen. It had felt so domestic, but I’d liked it. Maybe that was the kind of future that I wanted. With Harper, things were so much more comfortable than I’d ever imagined they could be. We just worked together. And with Ava, somehow I wasn’t so scared of turning into my father. I could never do that to her.
I started to think that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if Ava was my daughter. And I just had to know the truth, for sure. Otherwise, my mind was going to run away with all these crazy scenarios and finding out that Ava wasn’t my daughter was going to be difficult.
I’d debated calling Nancy back and asking if we could talk over all of that. But it was the same stuff that we’d talked about in our previous appointment. And Harper was the one that I wanted to talk to anyway.
Harper’s reaction only proved that I was right, too. She froze, her mouth open, just staring at me.
“Harper?”
I thought about what she had said at the same time, that she had something to tell me. Was that what she was going to tell me?
I waited for the anger to come. She hadn’t told me about Ava all those years ago, when she’d first gotten pregnant. Instead, she had just disappeared. I’d thought that I would never see her again. And if Ava really was mine, that wasn’t fair. She hadn’t let me choose to be there for my daughter. If I hadn’t run into Harper by chance, I might never have even known about the girl.
But I didn’t feel angry. Instead, I just felt depressed.
Maybe there was a reason Harper had never told me. Maybe she didn’t want me in our daughter’s life. She didn’t know the specifics of my past, but she knew enough about me, from when she’d interviewed me. Maybe she didn’t think I was fit to be a dad. Maybe she expected me to be like some of the other veterans, their lives ruled by nightmares and guilt and PTSD.
She still didn’t say anything.
“Harper, is that what you were going to tell me?” I tried again. “Ava, she’s my kid?”
“How did you know?” Harper asked, her voice barely audible.
And that wasn’t the reaction that I’d been waiting for. That was when the anger started. I shook my head in disgust. She couldn’t even say it out loud, could she?
“Actually, Sadie was the one to figure it out. She thought it was pretty obvious that Ava looked like me, and one of the days while we were working with Vixen, she made the mistake of asking if you and our daughter were going to come to the park as well.”
Harper flinched as though I’d hit her. “Our daughter,” she repeated, her voice still quiet. She bit her lip and looked away.
“How could you not tell me?”
Harper sighed. “It wasn’t that easy,” she said.
“Bullshit,” I said, shaking my head. “All you had to do was say that Ava was mine. We’ve been dating. And sleeping together. And you’ve been lying to me this whole time. I mean, I understand that things were different when I was still overseas—maybe then it would have been difficult to tell me. But now?”
Harper opened her mouth to say something, but I’d had it by now. This whole thing had been a mistake. I should have realized that she hadn’t been telling me the truth about Ava. And that she wasn’t going to own up to it even when confronted with the fact that I knew.
I stood abruptly, not giving her the chance to say anything. What could she say anyway? All she’d be able to do was make excuses, and I didn’t want to hear them. I didn’t want to hear that she was doi
ng what she thought was right for our daughter. That every decision about our daughter’s life was hers. It wasn’t fair. If I had only known about Ava, things might have been different.