Chapter 6

"You just can't stand to admit that you need me, can you?" Zhao demanded.

"I don't need you," Min said, staring straight ahead.

The windshield wipers swished back and forth, back and forth repetitive, monotonous, and hypnotic.

"Min," he said almost gently, "the news wasn't that bad."

"He couldn't give me a firm prognosis without any family history."

"He also said the baby's fine. And he asked you if you'd ever tried tracking down the identity of your mother."

Zhao glanced at her and signaled a turn. "You're a reporter. You're used to digging into records, solving puzzles. So why haven't you ever tried to solve this one? It might not be that hard if you were born here. How many babies born in Wutongshu thirty-one years ago were named Min Fen?"

She shifted uncomfortably. Her last name had been picked by someone at the orphanage. Her first and second names came from the note pinned to the blanket someone's hands had tucked around her before leaving her on the orphanage steps. "Her name is Min Fen," the note had said.

When she was small, she'd treasured that name because it was the one thing she was sure came from her mother.

When she grew older and less naive-when she stopped fantasizing about the woman who had borne her-she'd asked to be called by her initials. M.J. had quickly become Min. No one but Sister Limei had called her Min in years.

"Dr. Zimo doesn't have to know about her," she told Zhao. And neither do I.

They stopped at the light. "True. He was pretty optimistic about you being able to carry the baby full-term."

"That's right. So I can take care of myself again. I expect you to have your things moved out by tonight." The light changed. He muttered something under his breath and made the turn onto Oak Street. Her heart was beating hard and quick, twice as fast as the measured sweep of the wipers. Almost frantic. They were almost home...

But the apartment is home for me, she thought, not for him.

He's temporary.

"What are you going to do for money for the next year or so if I move out?"

"I've got savings. I can work awhile longer, too, part-time. Dr. Zimo said that as long as I get plenty of sleep at night I can be up for three hours at a stretch." Three hours up followed by one hour horizontal, with eight hours' sleep each night and limited exercise those were the rules for her now.

He made a skeptical noise. "What are you going to do stop in the middle of covering a drive-by and stretch out in your car when your three hours are up?" He shook his head. "And how long will you be able to work even part-time? As the pregnancy progresses you'll be able to spend less and less time on your feet."

"I've got savings," she repeated.

"Be reasonable, Min. You're not going to be able to support yourself. Let me."

Let him support her? Depend on him for everything from the roof over her head to things she didn't intend to contemplate. "I want you out. Tonight. You have to move out tonight."

Zhao was silent for the last block. Silent as he pulled into the apartment parking lot and parked in the empty space beside her Mustang. Then he turned to her, his expression grim. "You can't bring yourself to trust me at all, can you?

Yes, I'm the bastard who walked out on you. But I didn't lie to you. I don't break my promises, Min. I give you my word I won't abandon you and the baby."

Min wanted to argue, wanted to tell him she wouldn't trust him to pay a parking ticket for her, much less be responsible for her and her baby.

She wanted to lie. To both of them. "Oh, damn," she said softly, and leaned her head back against the headrest.

"It's me, not you. I can't stand to be dependent. Not on anyone. It makes me crazy, as if don't some animals gnaw their own legs off if they get caught in a trap?" She turned her head away, looking out the window instead. Her cherry red Mustang sat next to them, the hood all shiny with rain. Min had spent three years getting that car restored, getting things done a little at a time. It was a classic, in top condition.

Zhao shut off the ignition, leaving them in silence except for the hushed sound of the rain outside. "Min."

She looked at her Mustang now and wondered how much she could get for it. If she added that to what she had in savings, would it be enough?

"Min," Zhao said again.

Slowly, reluctantly, she faced him.

"Some animals, when caught in a trap, have been known to gnaw their legs off. But they bleed to death."

That was all he said no pleading, no demands. He didn't tell her she carried his child and that gave him a say in what she decided. He didn't repeat all the sensible things he'd said so far. He just sat there looking at her with his cop's face an expression that held little enough hope or compromise, but a surprising amount of compassion.

She could choose to deny Zhao 's help, and she would probably bleed to death financially. He knew it. So did she.

If she were the only one who would be hurt by her actions, she'd probably do just that. But she wasn't alone anymore.

She had to be strong and smart enough for two now.

She was terrified. "You could support me without living with me."

"No," he said, "I can't. Lord, Min, you did that series on the proposed budget cuts last summer. You know what cops earn."

"You're a detective. A lieutenant. You've been on the force for twenty years."

He snorted.

And he was right. She knew better.

His voice was very gentle when he spoke again. "Min, even if I move out now I'll have to move in again-maybe next month, maybe not for several months, but you're going to spend more time in bed as the baby gets bigger and heavier. You're going to need someone to take care of you."

The trap was swinging shut on her. "I don't want to be badgered about marriage. I don't want to hear about it."

"Is that a condition? All right. If it will make you feel better, I won't ask you to marry me again while I'm living with you. But that doesn't mean I'm giving up on the idea."

The rain had dwindled while they talked. It was a heavy mist now, damp and gray and good for little more than covering the sun. She swallowed, grabbed the cage door with both hands...and pulled it closed. "All right," she said. "I guess you'll want to sublease your apartment or something."

"Or something,"' he agreed. "But then, so will you."

She had to move.

It hadn't occurred to her until Zhao mentioned it. Min felt foolish for overlooking the obvious. Her apartment only had one bedroom, so she would have had to move when the baby came, or soon after, anyway.

To have room for Zhao in the months to come, she'd have to move sooner, that was all. He needed a room and a bed. He hadn't complained about sleeping on her couch, but she couldn't expect him to keep that up indefinitely.

If panic tickled at the back of her mind at the thought of yet another change, she ignored it. That afternoon, while Zhao was at work, she called her apartment manager, and she lucked out. Another unit would be available in ten days, a two-bedroom, town-house-style apartment.

She and Zhao were very reasonable, very civilized when they discussed the move that night at supper. He wasn't picky about where he lived, he said. She didn't mind if he wanted to blend a few of his things with hers, she said.

Because Min was used to throwing herself at whatever scared her, she insisted on making the arrangements herself, but she made the mistake of telling Yichen about the move.

That's when she lost control.

When Zhao came home two days later, the apartment smelled of some happy blend of food and spice. He closed the front door, took his hat off and set down the briefcase that held the results of his latest investigation a very personal investigation.

It had been a long time since he'd been greeted after work by the smell of supper cooking. His mother was a traditional homemaker. She believed in hot food and plenty of it for her family. Shi Yun, too, had loved to cook, to play with recipes, creating fancy dishes that were sometimes ruined by the time he made it home.

Zhao stood just inside Min's door now and waited for the grief or the guilt to hit.

But the feeling that slipped over him had nothing to do with guilt, and was only faintly tinged with sadness. Zhao had no name for what he felt as he stood there with his briefcase in one hand, his hat in the other. It simply rolled over him, as delicate as dawn, as sweet as homecoming.

He felt like a kid waking up on a birthday morning... only he was an adult, a man who had been out in the cold a long time.

Too long. He hadn't wanted to come in, and the warmth hurt as much as it compelled.

He followed his nose to the kitchen.

Min stood at the sink, rinsing lettuce. Her slacks and shirt were made of some crinkly material. One was royal blue, the other a bright yellow.

The wonderful smells were coming from a slow-cooker on the counter next to her. "I didn't know you cooked," he said.

"You knew I ate." She glanced over her shoulder at him. Maybe there was pleasure mixed with the wariness in her eyes. He wanted to think so. "I figured out years ago that if I wanted to eat anything but fast food I'd better learn how to fix it."

Months ago, when they were eating chips and salsa with their beer and arguing over who owed whom information, she'd told him what she usually did for supper. After eating junk all day she'd go home and throw some veggies in the steamer. There was a big difference in Zhao 's mind between steaming a handful of vegetables and really cooking.

He lifted the glass lid on the pot and fragrant steam puffed out. "Soup?"

"Mmm-hmm. It's sort of Italian." She gave him another quick glance. "You seem to like Italian.'"

He smiled. "You mean because I fixed us spaghetti twice in the past week and brought home pizza once, you think I like Italian food?"'

She smiled. Min's face was lovely when she was grouchy or tired; when she smiled all-out this way, she took his breath away. "That was a clue."

Her smile fed something in Zhao, a place where more than one appetite joined in a heady mix. Min had cooked for him. She might deny it if asked straight-out, but she'd his send this for him."

She told him he could get the bread from the oven and dish out the soup while she finished the salads.

It should have been simple enough to do. Zhao had made himself at home in her kitchen the past ten days. But it was such a small kitchen.

She brushed against him when she crossed to the refrigerator, and his body came to attention. A moment later he straightened as he closed the oven door, holding the hot bread with a dish towel. He turned. She was reaching for the grater on the top shelf, and they connected again, hip to hip this time. Her breath caught audibly.

Dr. Zimo had given Min the green light on more than one sort of activity. He'd said that sex was permissible at this time, too. What had been frustratingly impossible two days ago was all too possible now, and they both knew it.

After two seconds of heart-pounding silence, she moved away and started grating Parmesan on their salads.

Zhao let her. He studied her for a moment, his heartbeat hard and insistent. She didn't look at him. Her hands weren't steady. He nodded to himself and left to put the bread on the dining table. When he came back she was putting the grater in the dishwasher. He walked up to her.

She turned. He laid his hand on her hip and felt the quick jerk of her muscles from alarm-or delight. Her eyes went wide. She was warm and firm beneath his hand, beautifully curved as he ran his hand slowly up her body.

She stopped him with her hand as he neared her breast.

"No."

"Why not?" He looked at her flushed face. Her lips were parted. Her eyes held equal parts arousal and confusion, and he ached for her so badly he could hardly keep his hand from shaking. "I like touching you, Min." He shifted his hand away from the area she was forbidding him and caressed her waist. "You like it, too."

"It doesn't matter," she said a little desperately, and stepped away. "You promised-"

"I promised not to mention marriage." He smiled slowly. "I'm not asking you for marriage tonight. Let me touch you. Kiss you."

"That's not all you want."

"No, what I really want is to strip you, lift you up on that counter, and put myself in you as hard and deep as I can go. I'm ready, but that might be moving a little fast for you. I thought I'd start by touching you before I tasted you-your mouth, your throat, your breasts. I remember how sensitive your nipples are, Min." She looked shocked. Scared. And hungry.

"Don't tell me you don't want me to," he said, and stepped in close, looking down. He could see the lace of her bra and the hard little buttons of her nipples beneath the thin cloth of her shirt.

She shook her head. "What I feel it's only physical Hormones. They make a pregnant woman feel...sexy. But it isn't enough."

No, it wasn't. He wanted more, yet... If he could get her to accept him again physically, surely he could get her to accept all of him, eventually. "I can't." She held her head high, but her eyes were dark and jittery. "Don't push me on this."

For one long moment he thought he was going to do just that touch her, hold her, overwhelm her with her own needs as he'd done once before. But he remembered the contents of his briefcase.

No. No, he couldn't do it, not now, not when he planned to push her, hard, about something else tonight. He stepped back.

He could wait...a little longer.

Min's knees were still unsteady when they sat down to supper, but at least she had a table between her and Zhao now.

Why had he stopped? That question stuck in her head stubbornly. If he'd pushed, he could have had her. They both knew it. So why had he stopped? Was he being decent, respecting her wishes? Given their past history, she had trouble believing that. Zhao had used her before. Why would he hesitate to do so again?

Maybe he just didn't want her that badly.

He asked for the bread. She passed it to him and finished getting her breath under control before she spoke. "We're giving a party."

"We are?" He sounded mildly curious as he sampled the soup. If the hunger still roiling her system lingered in his, she couldn't see it. "Why?"

"I'm not sure," she muttered, blowing gently on a spoonful of soup. "I mean, I called Yichen this morning to ask who she'd gotten to move her stuff last year, and before I knew it, she's inviting people to our 'moving party'" He frowned. "How many people is she asking? Just because you can be up for short periods now doesn't mean you can take on anything as strenuous as planning a big party."

"Oh, I'm not doing anything. Do you think she'd let me have anything to say or do about any of this?" Min grimaced and broke off a piece of bread to dunk in her soup.

"No, all I'm supposed to do is accept help graciously, she said. And get you to call her. She wants a list of – these are her words—'cops with strong back' she can invite."

 They talked about the move and the party while they ate.

It was a relief, an enormous relief, to Min, having something sensible and relatively impersonal to discuss. For the first time since Yichen grabbed control of Min's moving plans, Min was glad for her friend's bossiness.

She was almost relaxed when they finished. Zhao insisted she go lie down while he did the dishes, and since she was about at the end of one of her three hour "up" periods, she agreed.

"Oh?" Min realized she wanted it to be a present, and felt foolish. Zhao wasn't the sort of man to give casual gifts, and any other sort was bound to have strings attached.

But it might be something for the baby.

He took a few sheets of paper out of the briefcase, closed it and held out the pages.

Curious, she took them. "Names," she said, scanning the pages. "Women's names." The list was divided into several groups, each group headed by the name of a different area hospital. She glanced at him, puzzled. "Are you trying in some weird way to come up with a name for the baby?"

"Those are the names of women who delivered a healthy female baby on June first in Wutongshu thirty-one years ago." June first. Her birthday. Understanding hit Min like a blow to the stomach. Her mother's name was on that list.

"You had no right," she whispered.

"You've never looked. Never tried to find out."

"How does that make this right?" She threw the pages at him. They fluttered ineffectually to the floor. "Didn't the fact that I've never tried to learn anything about her tell you anything? How dare you?"

"Why?"' he said, suddenly fierce. He knelt on the floor beside her. "Why haven't you looked, Min? What are you afraid of?"'

He caught her hands and held them both tightly in his.

"Even now, when it might help the doctor to know your background, you haven't wanted to find out. Why? What are you hiding from?"'

A tremor shook her. She couldn't hide it. "Her," she said, and her voice shook. She hated it, but couldn't get it to quit. "I don't want to know about her. She didn't want me. Why should I want to know anything about the woman who abandoned me?"

Slowly his hands loosened their grip without letting go completely. "You don't give second chances, do you?" he asked. His voice sounded odd. Almost bitter. "What about what the doctor said, Min? About the DES and how hard your mother must have fought to bring you into life?"

"I don't know," she whispered. It changed things. She didn't want it to. She'd fought not to look at what the knowledge altered because as soon as she did, she felt the old emptiness yawning inside, the terrible empty place that had always been there, always.

She shivered and didn't notice it was her hands now that held on to his. "I never wanted...a lot of kids who've been abandoned or given up for adoption make up dreams about who their parents were, how they were famous or rich, how they didn't really want to give up their baby. I did that when I was really small, but pretty soon I figured out..."

"What did you figure out?"

"Look at me. Thirty-one years ago it was hard enough to raise a child born out of wedlock. How much harder to raise one of mixed blood?" She managed to shrug.

"Maybe she had good reasons for what she did, but when you get right down to it, she gave me up because anything else was too much at it all came down to end her enough. That's what it all came down to."

"You don't know that." He stroked his hand slowly down her hair. It was incredibly soothing, that single caress.

"Maybe the uncertainty is what keeps you from putting it to rest. Maybe if you knew, one way or the other, you could put it behind you."

Most of the time she thought she had put it behind her.

Most of the time. "I don't know," she repeated. Challengingly she added, "Even if I did find out who my mother was, it's not likely I could learn anything about my father."

"True," he said. "They probably weren't married, after all. But if you found her, and she was still alive, you might ask her."'

The idea was so enormous, and came at her so unexpectedly, she forgot to breathe. Her father...she'd thought about her mother sometimes, years ago. She'd done her dreaming when she was little; she'd set the dreams aside with some bitterness as she grew older. She'd thought she'd even gotten past most of the bitterness.

She'd never even let herself dream about her father.

He stood. "You know," he went on as casually as if he hadn't just stopped her heart, "you need something to do.

If you decide you do want to go after your mother's identity, you might want to write it up. Do a series of articles or something.

She shook her head, but it was too late. The words had been spoken. The idea of finding who her mother was and maybe her father—fell into the empty place inside her, and lodged. "Aren't you going to tell me I should do this for the baby?"

He shook his head. "Between me, you and Dr. Zimo, our baby is going to be fine. No, if you decide to hunt for your mother, do it for yourself."

Three days later, Min called Xinou and proposed a series of articles for the Sunday "Family" section on adopted and abandoned children who chose, as adults, to find their birth mothers.

Four days after Min talked to Xinou, both the new and the old apartment were full of people carrying heavy objects from one unit to the other. Min had managed to get almost everything boxed up herself in the last few days, but she hadn't actually transported so much as a throw pillow. She'd barely been allowed to walk from one place to the other.

She was propped up now on her red couch for her "hour off," watching as four strong men maneuvered a large dining room table through the front door of her new apartment.

The table was Zhao 's. Hers was going into storage. "It's incredible," she murmured.

"Aren't they, though," Yichen said appreciatively. "Who would have thought Perkins from Marketing would look so good in shorts?"

Min gave her an amused glance. "I meant it's incredible that you coerced so many people into giving up a Tuesday evening to move my junk around."

"Oh, that." Yichen flipped her hand negligently. "I don't even know half these people. Your sweetie just gave me some names to call, and I did. Everyone wanted to help.

All they needed was the encouragement of a little free beer."

"Not to mention free food. Cops and reporters love free food," Min said dryly, glancing at the tiny patio out back, where two men were grilling hamburgers and hot dogs for the crowd on two barbecues. One was a reporter from a rival paper whom Min had dated briefly and remained friendly with.

The other was Zhao 's father.

Haoran Yang was a big man, not quite as tall as Zhao but broader through the chest and shoulders, with hair the sandy brown color of his younger son's. Chen would probably look a lot like that in another thirty years. But Haoran's eyes were like Zhao 's— pale like his, yes, but even more, they were a cop's eyes.

They were also a father's eyes, and something in the way they'd studied her when she met Haoran at a family dinner three nights ago told Min he was going to be a problem.

Min didn't want to deal with problems tonight. Her emotions had been on a roller coaster for too long. Tonight she wanted some time out, time to play.

"Don't call Zhao my 'sweetie,"" she told Yichen firmly.

"It sounds nauseating.

Yichen grinned unrepentantly. "Should I go back to calling him 'that sorry SOB"? "

"Not yet."

"How about that lover of yours with the world class buns'?"

"Not accurate." The damnable thing was that Min heard the regret in her voice herself. Her lips thinned.

"Oh?" Yichen 's expressive eyebrows shot up. "He does have a great butt, so you must not—"

"Down, girl, or I won't introduce you to the guy you've been ogling the one in the ratty T-shirt." Chen was one of the men carrying Zhao 's big dining room table down the entry hall at that moment, and Yichen 's eyes tracked him the way a cat tracks the flight of a bird.

Chen called out a question about where the table went, and Yichen jumped up. Min had shown her where things should go earlier, and she'd been bossing the men around enthusiastically.

"Have fun, General," Min told her.

Yichen grinned. "I'm practicing for when I have minions of my own." She hurried over to supervise.

For a moment Min was alone, but pleasantly so, surrounded by busy, noisy people. She smiled. She'd missed this the clamor, the confusion, the crowding.

It was kind of like at Saint Guer Cun's Home, wasn't it?

Funny, but she hadn't realized until now how closely she'd duplicated the conditions at the orphanage in her working life. She'd always been conscious of a need for private space, since that had been a rare commodity when she was growing up, but she hadn't known she also needed the noise and confusion of having people around.

"You look pleased with yourself," someone said.

She turned her head and saw Xinou approaching from the kitchen. "You know, it never occurred to me until I started trying to write in the middle of all sorts of peace and quiet how much I hate the stuff."

He smiled. "You managed to turn out a good story in spite of all that nasty peace and quiet. Prather saw it, too," he said, referring to the editor in chief. "He liked it. It'll be in next Sunday's edition."

Min's breath whooshed out in relief. She hadn't wanted to admit it, but she'd been anxious about the piece she'd turned in to Xinou yesterday, the first in her "A Search for Roots" series. It was different from anything she'd attempted before. Longer, more personal. Painfully so, in places.

"So," Xinou said, curious as ever, "how goes the mother hunt?"

She shrugged. "Slowly." To begin the articles, Min had contacted a support organization for adoptees. She'd interviewed three people who had completed their own searches or had given up. On her private hunt, she'd begun contacting the hospitals on Zhao 's list, checking the medical records of the babies born to those women.

Of course, there was no guarantee her mother was on that list. The woman might not have given birth to her in Wutongshu, or at a hospital.

None of the babies from the list had been named Min Fen. Zhao had helped her determine that much, and it shook her. Min had always thought her name was the one thing she knew came from her mother because of the note.

Who other than a mother and a very young, naive mother—would leave a baby in a basket on the steps of an orphanage, with a note pinned to the blanket? The act seemed to have been lifted from a nineteenth century novel.

Maybe, Min acknowledged, she just wasn't willing to give up believing that her name, at least, had come to her from her mother, but she had to organize her hunt in some fashion. She'd decided to first check out those babies who hadn't been named before leaving the hospital. Her mother might have named her after taking her home, after all.

The front door opened, spilling three of Zhao 's cop friends into the room three loud, laughing, complaining men carrying the chairs to the dining table. Zhao was with them. His eyes met hers. As quickly as that, her heartbeat picked up. Colors sharpened, but sounds faded as she looked into his eyes and quickly looked away.

How was she going to keep from making a fool of herself over this man a second time?

Zhao saw the way Min's eyes skittered away from his.

He set his jaw and endured the tightening of the tension he'd lived with for far too long.

She wouldn't even look at him anymore. Was it because of what had happened or almost happened in the kitchen last week? Or because he'd manipulated her into looking for her mother?

Her old apartment was almost empty. Zhao collected a few "volunteers" to bring the last of the things over. His brother wasn't one of them, though. Zhao noticed that, just as he noticed the way Chen sat beside Min on the couch, obviously comfortable with her. Just as he'd noticed how often his brother had been to see him since he'd moved in with Min...and how often he'd dropped by to check on Min when Zhao wasn't there.

Zhao didn't look at Min when he left.