Flower Net (Red Princess 1)

“Do you want a drink? Brandy? Water? A cup of tea?”

She turned to him and said mournfully, “I feel responsible.”

“So do I, Hulan, but we’re not. We couldn’t know it would turn out this way.”

“Did they have families?”

“Noel was single. God, he was just a kid, you know? He hadn’t really started his life. And Zhao? I read his file, but I can’t remember what it said.”

Hulan rubbed her eyes. There was nothing to say.

He took her by the arm. “Let’s go to bed.”

David held Hulan to him, and suddenly he wanted to tell her everything that he’d held back since first seeing her again at the Ministry of Public Security.

“You haven’t asked about my wife,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter.”

She sounded sincere, but he said, “I don’t want any more secrets. If tonight has shown us anything…Life is short. The future is uncertain. They’re clichés, Hulan, but there’s truth in them.” He squeezed her closer to him. “I just don’t want the past to stand between us. Not now, not ever again.”

He could feel her breath against his chest. Finally she said, “Tell me about her.”

“We met on a blind date. Jean was a lawyer, too, and Marjorie—remember her? at the firm?—set us up. It was Jean who first suggested that I was looking at what had happened with you all wrong. You left me in the worst possible way. You didn’t give me an opportunity to try to change your mind. You didn’t give me a chance to argue. You must have had a plan in place all along and it specifically involved hurting me. And I have to tell you, when I realized that, I hated you. Because I’d loved you when we were together. Because you’d lied to me. Because I couldn’t stop loving you even though you’d treated me so badly.”

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; “I’m sorry…”

“No, let me finish. We got married very quickly. You could say I was on the rebound, or that I wanted to trap her before she could get away, or that I needed to prove to myself that I could keep a woman. In retrospect, all of those things were true up to a point. I gave the marriage as much as I could. We bought this house. Our careers were going well. We had friends and went on vacations. I wanted to have children. But here’s the truth of it: I didn’t love her.”

“You don’t have to say that.”

“But it’s true,” he admitted. “Throughout our marriage I was still acting in reaction to you. What would you think if you saw this house? What would you think if you saw the necklace I bought Jean for her birthday? What would you think if you saw us with two children, a dog, and—Christ, I don’t know—a Volvo?”

“So you divorced her.”

David laughed bitterly. “She left me. She often threw you up to me. She called you the phantom who haunted our happiness. But when it came down to the end, she didn’t leave because of you. She left because I went to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. ‘Why leave private practice when things are going so well?’ she asked. What she meant was, Why leave a cushy, high-paying job for a hard, low-paying one? What could I say? That I remembered how you used to talk about doing good in the world? That I remembered how we had talked about how we could make things better through the law? That even five, seven, ten years after you disappeared I still thought about you, that I still cared about what you would think of me if we ever met again?”

Hulan waited, sensing that he wasn’t finished.

“I got to a place where I couldn’t bear the thought that I would run into you and the best I could say for myself was that I’d filed another lawsuit, written another brief, or billed two thousand hours,” he continued. “In this country, people talk a lot about being true to oneself, about midlife crisis, about living for the moment. I made the move to the U.S. Attorney’s Office knowing it would drive Jean away and knowing at the same time that it was my only hope to regain my sense of who I was. No one in the office really cared about Asian organized crime, so I asked Rob to let me have those cases. I bugged him and Madeleine, too. The whole time—whether I won or lost—I was thinking, hoping, that maybe I would run into you.”

“And you did.” Hulan pushed herself up on her elbows and stared at him. “You had no idea what I was doing. You were going on blind faith. And still you found me.”

“I love you,” David said simply.

Hulan ducked her head. When she raised it, he saw that her eyes were bright with tears. “I love you, too,” she whispered.

“Now that we’re together again, I want us to stay that way.”

“I don’t know…”

“You don’t have to go back to China. You can stay here. I’ll get you asylum. Everything will work out.”

“I want that as much as you,” she said.

She put her head back down on his chest and closed her eyes. Outside a pink and lavender sky pushed away the night. Birds greeted the dawn tumultuously. David lay awake for a few more minutes, wondering.