Chapter 24
HARLAN - ON PURPOSE
July came in hot and stubborn. Heat shimmered over the blacktop, cicadas droned so loud it felt like the air itself buzzed, and every sunset dragged its feet like it didn’t want to leave.
Somewhere in there, without me circling a date on a calendar, Ava started living at my place a couple of nights a week. But she would never admit it.
Not officially. A sweatshirt went “missing” and reappeared on my chair.
Her favourite tea migrated to my cabinet.
A hair tie lived on my gear shift. The toothbrush happened later, tossed into my medicine cabinet with a muttered, “Don’t make it weird, Chief,” that I pretended not to hear because my heart was beating too hard to trust my voice.
I’d told myself patience was the plan. That if I wanted something real with her, I couldn’t force it into a shape it wasn’t ready to hold. So, I learned to sit with wanting.
Wanting looks like this:
Her ankles tangled in my calves on the couch while we ate takeout and watched a documentary we liked to watch over and over again.
Her laugh hitting me square in the chest when I mess up the pan flip on a pancake at midnight.
Her ocean eyes, blue when she’s teasing, green when she’s bracing, storm-dark when she’s letting me see past the iron, tracking to my mouth and away again like she doesn’t trust her own hands.
And me? I keep my palms open. I let the moments come to me.
We fell into a summer rhythm. Long days, longer light. The clinic. The precinct. The truck with the dented side panel that made the best tacos in the county. I’d text her three words:
Truck. Eight. You?
And she’d show nine minutes late on purpose and make me pretend to be annoyed.
On the Fourth, we didn’t brave the crowds.
I parked the truck out past the old feed store, tailgate down, cooler between us.
The fireworks were far enough to be soft, just colour blooming over the tree line, a hum where the boom should’ve been.
She leaned against me with her bare feet propped on the bumper, toenails painted the exact colour of defiance.
“Do you ever wish you were somewhere else?” she asked, eyes on the sky.
“I used to,” I said. “Not tonight.”
She didn’t answer. But her fingers found that spot inside my elbow and rested there, light and sure, and I thought: remember this. Remember the exact weight of her hand when she’s not guarding the world.
Later, when the last sparks dimmed and the cicadas took the night back, she turned to me like she was going to say something that would change our shape. Her mouth parted. But there was something that looked like fear in her eyes.
I could feel the I love you, almost rise in her throat.
“Don’t,” I said softly. Not because I didn’t want it. Because I did. Because I wanted it too much to let it get born on the back end of fireworks and borrowed quiet.
Her eyes, green now, all question, searched mine.
“Let it be what it is,” I said. “Let it grow on purpose.”
She nodded once. Relief, maybe. Or confusion. Both look the same at first.
Mid-July ran hot and mean; tempers frayed the way rope does when it’s been hauling too much for too long. Remi worked herself down to a wire. Jack hovered at the edges of a choice he didn’t want to own. I took the calls I could and let the ones I couldn’t stack like storm clouds around my head.
When the thunder finally cracked, it wasn’t a case. It was me.
It happened on a Sunday, late, after rain.
Power flickered at my place, and we lit the big jar candle Ava liked.
She curled sideways on my couch with her notebook open and her hair up in a knot that was trying its best to fail.
Bare legs. One of my T-shirts was swallowing her, but somehow just covering the curve of her ass.
The ceiling fan kept time like a lazy metronome.
The world smelled like wet dust and butterscotch because she’d found the cheap candies in my desk and declared me eighty years old.
And of course, she texted a picture of them to Remi.
She was writing something and didn’t notice I was watching her like a man who’d been starving and didn’t realize it until the food was in front of him.
“What?” she asked without looking up.
I swallowed. “There’s something I haven’t told you.”
She closed the notebook. Waited.
I told her about the sand first. About how it gets into places no one warns you about, how it chews up patience and gear in equal measure. How the air can go from blister to ice the second the sun drops. How your bones learn distances the way other people learn songs.
Then I told her about Westin.
“He was better than me,” I said, hands flat on my knees so I wouldn’t clench them. “Younger. Faster. The kind of guy who made everyone around him sharper just by standing there. We were six months into our rotation and tired in that way that makes you feel invincible and dead at the same time.”
The memory tasted like iron. Like heat.
“Command said wait,” I continued. “Said the intel was thin. Said we didn’t have a clean exfil. But we had a signal from a local we trusted, and there were civilians in the open with a patrol moving in. I looked at Westin and I said, ‘We go now. We’re not letting them burn while we do math.”
“And?” Ava’s voice was barely a whisper.
“We went.” I felt the old decision lodge in my ribs, same spot it always did. “And we got them out. But we couldn’t get everyone back. Westin took the rear. I should’ve been there. I should’ve...”
My throat closed. The storm outside wasn’t loud enough to hide it.
“I broke command,” I said. “I broke the thing that keeps everyone using the same language when the world goes sideways. And I got my friend killed.”
Silence. Not the sharp kind. The kind that makes room.
“I came home because of that,” I added. “Because I needed rules to hold while I learned to hold myself again. Procedure isn’t a shield for me. It’s penance. It’s how I make sure my heart doesn’t outrun my judgment.”
She moved then. Not away. Closer. She straddled my lap and cupped my jaw with both of her hands. “You were trying to save people,” she said.
“I was,” I said. “And I did. But saving people isn’t enough if you lose your team to do it. I have to live with both parts.”
A long beat. Ceiling fan. Rain on the window.
She lifted my hand and pressed it to her cheek. Warm. Damp at the corner of her eye.
“Thank you for telling me,” She whispered.
I didn’t deserve the grace in her voice. I took it anyway. Carefully. Like it might break if I breathed too hard.
Later that night, I woke to her rolling toward me in the dark. She tucked her face into my neck and exhaled like she’d been holding her breath for too long. I wrapped around her and thought, there it is. The thing I’m choosing. Not by accident. On purpose.
August softened the edges. Nights came with crickets and the smell of cut hay drifting across town.
The county fair popped up around the second week, lights strung sloppily over metal, dust rising off the lot, teenagers pretending not to be seen by the people who raised them.
We went on a Tuesday to avoid the crowds.
Ava laughed at me when I failed to win her a stuffed bear at the ring toss, and louder when I pretended, I hadn’t been trying.
“I don’t need a bear,” she said, eyes more blue than green beneath the midway bulbs. “I need a funnel cake.”
I stood in line while she leaned on the rail, watching the Ferris wheel turn lazily against a sky flirting with storm. When I brought the plate back, powdered sugar had already found her collarbone.
“Hold still,” I said.
I bent down and softly licked the powdered sugar from her skin... She went very still. For a second, I thought I’d done something wrong. Then her breath hitched, barely, and she leaned forward, tasting sugar off my lips like it was the most natural choice in the world.
We didn’t ride the wheel. We sat on the hood of my truck and watched it instead, slow lights turning above the field. She tucked into me, and I learned the exact shape of her head against my chest, the way she hooks her hand in my shirt when she’s happy without announcing it.
“Say it,” she murmured against me, teasing.
“What?”
“That you like this. The noise. The mess. Me inhaling three thousand calories of fried dough.”
“I like all of it,” I said before I could stop myself.
She pulled back enough to look at me. The green was back now, searching, assessing, and I realized I’d given away more than I meant to. So, I didn’t take it back.
I let it stand between us and watched her decide not to run.
The Perseids came mid-month. She texted me at 1:07 a.m. You awake? And I was before the phone buzzed. We drove out past the old quarry, climbed onto the tailgate with a blanket and thermos coffee that tasted like burnt hope, and watched the sky throw sparks over our heads.
“I used to make wishes on these,” she said.
“What do you wish for now?”
She was quiet long enough, I thought she might not answer. Then: “Not to have to wish for anything.”
“Ambitious.”
“Selfish.”
“Honest,” I said.
She turned her face toward me. The starlight found her cheek. Something in my chest did that painful expand-and-catch thing again.
I could’ve said it then. I could’ve folded her name around the word that had been pacing the back of my tongue for months. But I heard my own voice from July on the tailgate and obeyed it.
Let it grow on purpose.
So, I kissed the corner of her mouth. She chased me for the rest. The meteor shower didn’t notice and kept burning itself, hopeful overhead.
I paid attention that summer. To how her shoulders dropped half an inch the second she crossed my threshold.
To how she hates air-conditioning set too low because it reminds her of hospital hallways.
To how she likes peaches cold from the fridge and hates the sound of ice clinking in an empty glass.
To how her eyes go almost sea-green when she’s bracing for bad news and slate-blue when she’s laughing so hard she snorts and then threatens violence if I bring it up later.
I learned her. Not to keep her. To meet her.
By the last week of August, when the sun started losing its nerve a little earlier and the cicadas gave ground to crickets, I knew two things with a clarity that didn’t scare me like it should have.
One: I loved her. Quietly. Completely. The kind that isn’t a firework but a pilot light that never goes out.
Two: I was going to wait until the words didn’t take anything from her to say them. Until they were a gift she could put in her pocket and not a weight around her neck.
So, I held them. I let the summer hold us. And when she fell asleep on my chest after a day that had taken too much from both of us, I pressed my mouth to her hair and told the ceiling fan the truth.
On purpose.