“So you what, ran away from home, then?” I asked.
“Nah,” Ace said. “One of the neighbors heard us going at it and called the police. When they showed up, my dad was unconscious on the floor, and I was just sitting there on the couch, staring off into space, all covered in blood. They knew something was up. They moved me into the foster care system.” He flashed me the ghost of a smile. “One of my foster dads probably saved my life by pointing a very angry kid toward the military. It was my ticket out of West Virginia and away from my dad.”
Ace ran a hand back through his hair. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but you’re part of the reason I came here when I got released from service. There was also this postcard one of my friends gave me of Cape Cod. And after so much time in the desert in Kuwait, I just really needed to see an ocean. But I knew that you were here. And I think subconsciously, I was just hoping that I’d run into you one day. I just didn’t know where else to go. I couldn’t go back to West Virginia, and I’d never really lived anywhere else except for the base that I shipped out from.”
I frowned, trying to sort out how I felt about this new information. But I supposed I already kind of knew that I was the reason he was there in Boston.
The tricky part was sorting out how I felt about the rest of it. Did I feel safe, having him around Ava? He seemed worried that he would relapse, that he would turn into that angry kid. That he would end up just like his dad.
But then again, I trusted Ace. And I could tell that he cared about both me and Ava. If he really thought that he was a harm to anyone, I didn’t think that he would put himself in that situation. He would be the first to leave before I even realized that there was something wrong.
“I shouldn’t have walked out on dinner the other night,” Ace said quietly. “I was just so angry, and
I hadn’t felt that in a long time. You can’t afford to get angry like that when you’re in the military. Otherwise, it’ll consume you. You’ll fuck things up. You’ll doom the mission. You’ll get yourself killed.” He paused. “I guess that’s been the most difficult thing about coming back. Recognizing that I have emotions again and recognizing that it’s okay to act on those emotions.” He grinned ruefully. “I guess I’ve always had that problem around you, though. I can’t seem to keep my emotions in check.”
“I have the same problem,” I admitted, even though I knew that he already knew that. Neither of us ever seemed fully capable of taking things slow, of keeping our hands off the other person. But was that what I wanted now?
“There’s another thing I have to tell you,” I sighed.
“Uh oh,” Ace said, looking wary.
“I left early. In Kuwait. I knew you guys were only going to be out for a short amount of time, but I was so worried about seeing you again. It felt like the biggest possible professional mistake. I know things would have been bad for you if they’d found you were fraternizing with me, but things would have been just as bad for me. I felt like I had failed myself.
“And on top of that, I was just so confused. I really liked you, Ace. But I knew that you were planning on never getting married, on never having a family. I knew you were planning on staying over there for the rest of your life if you could. And I just wasn’t sure how to handle that. I knew that I was going to be leaving. I had to; it wasn’t like I could just stay over there. And I started thinking about what I would do if you got hurt out there, if I had to write your obituary. I couldn’t do it. I had to leave.”
Ace stared at me for a long moment. “Your career was more important than our budding relationship,” he said slowly. But I could tell from his crooked smile that he was teasing.
I still sighed. “Honestly? Yeah, it was.”
“But having Ava has derailed everything, hasn’t it?” Ace asked.
I frowned. “Yes and no,” I said slowly. “I won’t lie, things haven’t been easy, and I definitely haven’t been getting the same caliber of pieces since then. But I’ve been working my way back up there. I might not ever get to be a foreign correspondent again, but I’m pretty happy with the work I’m doing in the community, all the same.”
“That’s good,” Ace said.
“What about you?” I asked. “Like I said, I thought your plan was to stay over there for as long as you could. Now you’re back here and making a career out of training dogs.”
Ace grimaced. “I did stay over there for as long as I could,” he said. “After a while, I guess it starts to get to you. You start to have a hard time sleeping, and then you start making stupid mistakes. And my reflexes just aren’t quite what they used to be.” He snorted. “Don’t get me wrong; I’m still quicker than your average Joe, but I wasn’t quick enough to do some of the stuff I used to do over there. After a certain point, I started feeling more like a liability than an asset when we would go out. So I decided it was time to call it quits.”
“And the dog thing?”
“I did some of that for the SEALs, too. It wasn’t totally out of the blue.” Ace paused. “I thought about working at one of the bases, training the new recruits. But I’ve never been that kind of a people person, you know? I’m much more comfortable working with dogs all day, every day. It’s more fun for me and takes less energy.”
“That’s fair,” I said, nodding.
It was good just to talk to Ace again. I could almost forget about the elephant in the room—Ava. What were we going to do about Ava? And how would that affect the relationship between Ace and me? Talking about our careers was one thing, but it wasn’t what we had come here to do.
I swallowed hard, trying to think of a way to broach the subject, knowing that it needed to be done.
36
Ace
Telling Harper about my father felt like a huge weight lifted off my chest. It felt awfully freeing to have all of this out in the open. Not only did it lessen my burden a little, but Harper didn’t judge me in the way that I might have expected her to. She didn’t just get up and leave when I admitted that I’d almost killed my father. She didn’t tell me that she didn’t want me anywhere near Ava. Instead, she just seemed to accept it.
I was actually surprised at how easy it was to tell her about it. It was partly that same thing: that she just accepted it. And I trusted her to accept it and not judge me. But there was more to it as well. I had always felt comfortable around Harper from the very beginning. I knew that she had heard some gnarly stories from the other guys that she had interviewed, and it seemed like nothing could faze her. She just listened through all of it.
Something had shifted between us, too. It was just like Nancy had said: telling Harper about my childhood seemed to have fostered trust between us. Things felt instantly more comfortable. On top of that, Harper admitted to a couple things of her own, like having left Kuwait early to avoid me.