Mom was silent for a long moment. It wasn’t the response I was looking for. Not that I’d wanted her to deny that that was a possibility. If she had, I wouldn’t have believed her, and that would have bothered me even more, but I’d expected some empathy maybe.
Instead, she shrugged, folding her arms over her chest. “You knew that that was a possibility,” she reminded me. “And I’ve been telling you all along that hiding the truth from him wasn’t going to help anybody. You needed to give him the chance to decide what he wanted to do. How he wanted to be involved in your lives. Or not.”
“I know that,” I said impatiently. “Whose side are you on anyway?”
Mom sighed. “I don’t like this any more than you do,” she said flatly. “This is my one grandbaby that we’re talking about here. Don’t think I don’t realize how this affects me, too. If he sues you for custody and is granted it, I won’t get to see her any more often than you do. But I understand where he’s coming from.”
“It’s not fair, though,” I said, shaking my head. “Ava’s more my daughter than his. I mean, I know, genetic makeup and everything. But I had to carry her for nine months, and I had to give birth to her. And then I raised her, for three years, all by myself. He can’t just storm in here and take her away from me.”
Mom was silent again, and I felt like I was going to burst into tears.
“I don’t know why I even came over here,” I said. “You’re not helping anything.”
“Neither is that attitude,” Mom said tartly. “Now why don’t you stop trying to blame people, and we can start figuring out what we’re going to do to get through this?”
As much as I hated to admit it, she was right. There was no point thinking about how things could have been different, if I’d only told Ace about Ava sooner, or if I hadn’t ever run into him in Boston, or if…. There were a thousand different ways that things could have played out, but this was the reality, the current situation. And the only thing to do was figure out how to fix it as best we could.
“I really love him, though,” I said quietly.
For the first time since I’d gotten there, I saw a flicker of compassion on Mom’s face. “I know,” she said quietly. “And if he really loves you, too, then he’ll do what’s right by you. You just have to trust him.”
I only wished it were that easy.
32
Ace
I didn’t hear from Harper all weekend. And even though I wanted to call her, to talk about the Ava situation and what we were going to do, I needed to get my thoughts straightened out first. Half the time when I thought about it, a life with Harper and Ava was exactly what I thought I wanted. And the other half of the time, it terrified me.
Not least of which because, if things didn’t work out between Harper and me, where would that put me with Ava?
I went to work on Monday, but my head was still fixed on Harper and Ava. I should have handled things better. I should have reached out to her, told her that it was okay. Explained that I was just really shocked. Like Nancy had suggested, I should have explained to Harper about my own childhood, about my fears when it came to having children.
Instead, Harper probably thought that I was having second thoughts about having children, that I had decided to revert to what I had foolishly said back in Kuwait, about how I never wanted to get married or have kids, about how I wanted to devote the rest of my life to the military.
In the end, that hadn’t been sustainable. I’d reached a certain point where everything with the SEALs was too much for me, where I was ready for the next chapter.
I still hadn’t told Harper about all the progress we were making with the new training facility, and I hated that. I wanted to share those things with her. I wanted things to go back to the way that they were.
But I knew that was impossible. Now I knew for sure that Ava was my daughter. Before I talked to Harper again, I had to figure out exactly what I wanted. But the more time went by before I talked to her, the more I felt like that decision was being made for me. She must think I hated her. And I hated the thought of that more than anything.
Now, I was worried that if I saw her again, I would start to get angry all over again. I had missed so much of Ava’s life already. How dare she keep all of that from me? And how dare she not let me have a say in any of it or help out with any of it? I was so determined to not be my asshole of a father, but she had made me into something worse. She had let Ava believe that, what, her father didn’t love her, didn’t care about her?
I would have cared about her if only I had known about her.
All day, I thought about Ava. About her cute little smile. My smile. My eyes, and my smile.
I had to make things right with Harper. I didn’t want to miss out on Ava’s childhood, not anymore. I knew that was true. Whatever might happen between Harper and me, we had to figure out a way for us both to be involved in our daughter’s life.
I thought about calling Harper that night and inviting her out to dinner. The dinner that we were supposed to have on Thursday. We would sit down and actually talk, like adults, about what we were going to do. I wanted to know everything about Ava. What her favorite color was, what kinds of things she liked, other than dogs. I knew she liked dogs.
I wondered about getting her a dog. I knew that Harper wasn’t sure that they could take care of a dog, but maybe I could help with that. Even if it wasn’t one of the training dogs, one of the dogs that would eventually go on to someone else, maybe it would be okay for me to bring Ava’s dog into work. That would mean Harper would only need to handle feeding the pup dinner. And I could imagine a little puppy sleeping there at the foot of Ava’s bed, growing up alongside her.
It was such a cute image, but I knew I had to talk to Harper about all of this first. Figure out what kind of role I was going to play in Ava’s life before I started doing things like buying her puppies.
It was busy at work that day anyway, though, and I knew that Harper wouldn’t be able to get a sitter on a moment’s notice. Or at least, she would probably feel guilty if she needed to. Better to call her another day and plan ahead.