“Turned out Fleet Week coincided with HackAttack. It’s an annual programmer competition—one of the big tech firms hosts. Contestants get a series of complex security grids and firewalls to hack. The winners get job offers and cash prizes. The NSA and CIA follow it for recruits. It’s a big deal for coders. I told her that I wasn’t competing, but I could help.
“She took one look at my uniform and said, ‘no thanks.’ So I sat down next to her and looked at her screen. She was going in guns blazing, implementing a Denial of Service protocol to crash the system. I told her she didn’t need to use a wrecking ball, snatched the laptop, and typed in some code to ghost the sequence. She could slip into the system, and no one would ever know she’d done it.”
“Maybelle, the look she gave me. I think I would have burned down the city to get her to look at me like that.”
“Musta been some look.”
“The thing is, I know I was looking at her in exactly the same way. I held out my hand and said my name, and when she touched me, it was like some force sealed us in a vacuum, like nothing or no one could touch us. I never left her side that week. We walked all over the city, ate, went to Ground Zero. I helped her hack the systems for the competition.
“I was doing some programming work in the Navy. The encryption we used was similar to the system she was trying to penetrate. Our stuff was a little more sophisticated, but the point is I had some inside information that the other competitors didn’t have. Charlotte wouldn’t take it. She could have used my knowledge of the system; the HackAttack rules are there are no rules, but she wanted to do it on her own. God, she was so fucking smart—brains and kindness and light all wrapped up in this perfect little body.”
Finn stood and walked to the window. May’s garden was just showing signs of spring; bulbs were peeking up, and buds were appearing on branches. “Her parents had this great house in the West Village where we stayed. We ate pizza in bed and wrote fucking code. It rained for two of the days, and we walked everywhere. I bought one of those cheap umbrellas from a guy on a street corner.
“The last day, she walked me back down to the ship. I promised I’d email her, write to her every week.”
“Then you went to war, and the bubble burst,” May said.
“Before…” Finn leaned against the sill and looked at his boots. “Nothing ever got to me. My parent’s divorce? Hey! Two Christmases! My girlfriend breaks up with me? Now I can go after the next girl. You know I got a full ride to Penn State revoked after I got caught hacking into my high school’s computer system to change a grade for a buddy. I didn’t give one shit. Drove down to the recruitment office and joined the Navy.
“Before that cave, I was fucking Teflon.” He scrubbed a hand down his face. “So when you say the bubble burst... It wasn’t one bubble. It was all of them. The bubble of my childhood, bike rides, and football games. The bubble of my family, my friends, my life. Those three days in that cave took every bit of happiness and innocence and optimism I had ever felt and compressed it into this dark ball of hate.
“I hated that I had been so naive, hated that I had been so stupid. I hated my family for making me think our happy little life was normal. And most of all, I hated Charlotte. I hated her for showing me that glimpse of paradise, knowing I would never have it, knowing it was all some bullshit fantasy.”
“So you ended it with her,” May concluded.
Finn tipped his head up and looked at the ceiling. “I didn’t end it. I fucking napalmed it.” He returned to the couch. “You know, looking back, I wasn’t truly angry until that day seeing Charlotte. I walked out of the bar where we met up so full of hate and disgusted with myself I wanted to walk in front of a bus.” He pulled a throw pillow onto his lap and fiddled with the tassel at the corner. “I actually felt the numbness come. It kind of oozed over me like sap. I think everyone assumes I changed because of this.” He tapped his face. “But that wasn’t it. I changed after that meeting with Charlotte.”
“You hurt the one you loved.”
“I didn’t just hurt the woman I loved. I hurt the only woman I would ever love. I knew Charlotte would recover—she’s too good, too open-hearted—she could find love again, but I knew that was the end for me.”
“The end?” May asked.
“The end of caring. About anything.” Finn pulled on a frayed thread of his jeans. “My buddies think I joined the CIA right after my injury, but that’s not true. I was cleared for duty after six months. I was planning on going back to my SEAL squad. But after that meeting with Charlotte, I turned to fucking stone. I knew I couldn’t rejoin the Teams because I didn’t fucking care, and you can’t do that job if you don’t care.”
May nodded her understanding.
“So, that’s my love story. I guess when my flame got separated from Charlotte’s, it went out.”
Maybelle took his empty mug and rinsed it in the sink. Finn noticed she leaned heavily on the counter as she worked one-handed. “There’s something I’d like you to consider,” she said.
“What’s that?” Finn asked.
“The emotion you’ve assigned to this feeling inside of you is hate, but I don’t think that’s it.”
Finn narrowed his gaze.
“I think it’s fear.” She quelled Finn’s protest. “Hear me out. I don’t need to know what happened in that cave. Judging from the look of you, I can guess. If you want to tell me, fine. If not, that’s fine too. Just think about it. Think about what happened to you and how you’ve responded. I don’t know if it’ll change your outlook at all, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to say you hate something than to say you’re afraid of something.”
Before Finn could argue, Maybelle pulled open the kitchen door and shooed him out. “Tomorrow, we’re patching the roof.”