“Embry!” Colchester said, catching sight of me and beckoning me over.

I never could resist it when he said my first name. I went to him.

“This is Merlin Rhys.” Colchester introduced us, and I shook hands with the man in the suit. “He’s here doing some work on the Queen’s behalf. It looks like the Brits will be joining us soon.”

“Very soon,” Merlin said as our hands separated. “I expect in three months or so.” I noted that his posh accent was very slightly betrayed by his tapped rs—Welsh, perhaps.

“I’m Lieutenant Embry Moore,” I said. “It’s a pleasure.”

“Vivienne Moore’s son, right?” Merlin asked.

I didn’t bother hiding my surprise. “That’s right.”

“I keep up with American politics,” he explained. “She gave a rather moving speech about having a deployed son last month, didn’t she?”

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. She did give that speech and to much fanfare. While I didn’t doubt that some of her sentiments were genuine, I also didn’t doubt that she displayed those sentiments in the most politically advantageous way possible. But I couldn’t say all that to this guy, so I just said, “Yes. She did.”

Merlin glanced down at his shoes—dress shoes with mud clinging to the shiny sides—and he kept his eyes there as he spoke. “And how is your aunt Nimue?”

“You know Nimue?”

He smiled and looked at me, and I recognized that look. I imagined I wore it a lot around Colchester. “Yes,” he said softly. “I know her.”

“Well,” I said, trying to smother my intense curiosity, “she had a baby a few months ago. A little boy. Lyr.”

“Lyr,” he said, his voice cradling the word. “A Welsh name. It means ‘from the sea.’”

“She lives in Seattle. She’s kind of a literal person.”

He laughed at that. “She is, isn’t she?”

“How do you two—”

He waved a hand. “It’s a long story, and fittingly enough, it involves your mother being rather angry with me. I’ll tell it to you someday. For now though, I should get on. Lieutenant Colchester, I hope very much we’ll be in touch soon. Lieutenant Moore, it was lovely to meet you and please tell your family hello from me. Or perhaps just your aunt—I don’t think Vivienne wants anything from me other than a goodbye.”

He shook our hands and left, his carefully tailored suit and precise gait so out of place in our grimy pre-fab Army base that I couldn’t help but shake my head. “What did he want with you?” I asked Colchester.

Colchester shrugged those powerful shoulders. “No idea, but he asked the captain for me by name.” He frowned. “I hope I’m not in trouble.”

“Why would you be in trouble? You’re the hero, everybody’s golden boy.”

“Oh stop.”

“I mean it. I hope we all make it into your memoir when it comes out.”

“I’m not writing a memoir.”

“You will before you run for office,” I said.

“One day that joke is going to get old,” he warned me.

“Never.”

He considered me a moment and then asked, “Do you want to take a walk?”

My mouth went dry. “Yes,” I said. “That would be nice.”

The spring chill hovered under the trees as we kicked our way up the narrow path away from the base, but the birds trilled and hopped around anyway, and tiny flowers pushed their way out of the soil wherever a patch of sunlight fell through the trees.

We didn’t go far—although we were both technically dismissed from duties that day, there’d been enough separatist activity in our valley to make being out of sight of the base a dicey prospect. Instead, we found a ridge that overlooked our compound and sat, feet dangling over the valley floor.

“So you’re leaving tomorrow,” Colchester said, looking down over the base. “Going home.”

“For as long as they’ll let me.”

“I wish I could’ve seen more of you,” he said, and my chest tightened.

I couldn’t bear him saying things like that, couldn’t bear it, and so I tried to redirect him, blunt the intensity. “And seen more of Morgan, I’m sure.”

He shook his head. “That’s not what I meant. I really enjoyed the time I spent with Morgan—every moment of it—but I don’t need to see her again. And when you go…I’m going to feel very much like I need to see you again.”

And my chest tightened even more. “Colchester—”

He glanced at me, a flash of green framed by long black lashes. “My closest friends call me Ash.”

“I thought your first name was Maxen.”

“And so it is, but…” He chewed his lip for a moment, as if deciding how much to tell me. “I never knew my biological parents. There’s no father on record and my birth mother named me, but a name was all she was willing to give, I guess. And so Maxen—Max—was what I was called until Mama took me in when I was four. The day I moved into her house, she let me pick out my own name, a new name, one that I could use with my new life and my new family.” He smiled. “She was the kindest, sweetest person I’d ever met—there wasn’t a time that I could go to her that she wouldn’t pick me up and cuddle me. I told her I wanted to have the same name as her, and she laughed. She said she wouldn’t let a little boy be named Althea but that I could have her middle name. And when I was officially adopted a few years later, we made it official. No longer Maxen Smith, but Maxen Ashley Colchester. Ever since then, I’ve thought of Ash as my real name. The name given to me out of love and not—” he waved a hand at nothing in particular “—abandonment.”