An Act of Persuasion

by Stephanie Doyle

  Marie was openly sobbing and Dom was doing everything he could to maintain his composure. Mark knew his daughter was hurting, but she was deliberately and maliciously hurting them all and he wouldn’t have it.

  “That’s enough!” Mark got in her face so she could see he wasn’t playing around. “I know this sucks large for you, but this is your life. I am your father. You will live with me. And you will let your grandparents off the hook. This is not their fault. Everyone keeps telling me how mature you are…well, start acting like it!”

  She jerked and he could see she was thinking about heading for the front door. Thinking of making a run for it, he imagined. It was exactly what he would do if he felt similarly cornered. Fortunately, paranoid former operative that he was, he’d installed a lock that required a key to function on both the inside and outside. And he’d had the foresight to lock it as soon as they walked through the door.

  He shook his head. “You can’t run—the door’s locked and I have the key. However, if you would like to take some time to enjoy your lovely new room—”

  The words were barely out of his mouth before she stormed down the hallway. The slam of a door closing echoed throughout the space.

  Mark turned back to a sobbing Marie and a stalwart, but wounded, Dom.

  “That went as well as we could have expected, I think.”

  A crash sounded from inside the bedroom accompanied by a host of discordant electrical noises. Mark had a feeling she would need a new keyboard.

  His daughter, it seemed, had a temper.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “HE WANTS TO LIVE with me.”

  “That’s funny. She doesn’t want to live with me.”

  Anna and Mark were sitting in his office eating what constituted a ridiculous amount of Chinese food. To be fair to Mark, most of it was for her.

  It had been several weeks since Ben asked the question and she still didn’t know the answer. She’d been able to hold him off each time with her standard line that she would think about it. So far all that thinking hadn’t gotten her far.

  And she realized the debate was starting to become moot. He came over to eat dinner and watch TV with her every night.

  Slept with her every night.

  The days of telling him she needed space were gone, because the reality was she didn’t want space. Not from him. Even now he’d taken possession of closet space and two drawers in her dresser. Not to mention the master bathroom cabinet filled with shaving foam and razors.

  Man stuff.

  She was fairly certain the only thing Ben didn’t have at her place was his furniture and the tuxedo she knew he owned.

  “I take it Sophie hasn’t come around yet to her new reality.”

  “No. She’s threatening to petition the court for legal status. Her grandparents are a wreck. I’m a wreck.”

  “She’s a wreck,” Anna added.

  Mark tossed his chopsticks aside and leaned back in his chair. “Yeah. She’s a wreck. And I don’t know how to get through to her.”

  “Don’t stop. That’s all you can do. If you stop, she’ll feel like you’ve left her all over again.”

  Mark shrugged. “I wish I could believe persistence and patience will work. Turns out my daughter is very stubborn.”

  “She and Ben have a lot in common. Are there any dumplings left?”

  Mark checked one of the containers. But Anna already knew there would be more. Certain one order of dumplings wasn’t going to be enough she had made sure to order three. That should have given them plenty even if Mark was a dumpling man.

  “There are, like, a million left.”

  Anna pushed her paper plate toward him and held up three fingers. She watched as Mark dished out the food and then decided two more weren’t going to kill her.

  “You’re a bottomless pit, you know that?”

  “I’m eating for two,” she mumbled around the bite of steamed dough and pork meat in her mouth. “Cut me some slack.”

  “So I know why Sophie doesn’t want to live with me. She thinks I abandoned her and now I’m no better than a stranger to her. She’s mostly right. What’s your deal?”

  Anna didn’t know what her deal was. At first she’d needed time to think. Her relationship with Ben was changing at a rapid pace and moving in together was a major decision. Now that he was practically already there it seemed a bit silly to tell him she didn’t think she was ready for him to move in.

  There was the argument for letting him move in completely. Her number-one reason to support that idea? She liked having him there. She really, really liked having him there.

  Still, she couldn’t get past the fact everything was moving too fast. Her body was growing in leaps and bounds. The baby was mounting an attack from the inside of her body. Anna recalled vividly the doctor telling her she should expect to feel the first fluttering of movement from within.

  Not her. The first thing she felt was a swift kick to the ribs. Not too long after that Ben had felt the baby kick, too. He’d spent the entire night with his hand on her stomach waiting for it to happen again. The man was belly crazy. Or at least crazy with what was inside it. One more reason to be cautious before committing to anything.

  “We’ve only been dating for a couple of months,” Anna said as she dipped her dumpling in a sauce so perfectly tart and delicious she wanted to drink it. But that might be overkill. “That’s too soon.”

  “You’ve known each other for six years and you lived with him once already when he was sick. If that isn’t seeing someone at their worst, I don’t know what is. I think you can safely say you two know what it’s like to live together. In good times and in bad.”

  “This is different.”

  “Why?”

  Anna looked at the man who was her boss, but who had become her friend, too. She wanted to be honest with him. Or, maybe more accurately, she wanted to be honest with herself and she wanted someone else to listen.

  “All those years with Ben…I mean, I thought I loved him. I did love him. But now I know how easy it was. How simple and uncomplicated it was. The whole time I got to love him I didn’t have to worry about his feelings for me. I could simply pretend and it was enough. We worked together. We ate together. We were a team. Even when he got sick that was easy, too. I knew what I had to do. Take care of him. Help him to get better. It didn’t start to get hard until—”

  “Until you thought you were going to lose him.”

  She shook her head. “No, I never thought I was going to lose him. I wouldn’t let myself form the idea. To me it was unfathomable. It was when I realized he thought he would lose his battle. When he decided it was all or nothing…without me, that’s when I knew I couldn’t pretend anymore.”

  “So you ran.”

  Anna winced. “I made a strategic exit. Everything is different now.”

  Mark laughed. “Yeah, because you’re not in an imaginary relationship anymore. You’re in a real one.”

  She hated to hear him verbalize it. But she knew it was true. All those years she thought she’d been in love, but never once had she been scared of it. Now she spent most of her days with a knot in her stomach that no amount of antacid would relieve and it wasn’t the baby’s fault.

  “I was playing at love, wasn’t I?”

  “I don’t think so. If it weren’t grounded in something real, you would have ditched him already and fallen in love with me instead. I would be your new fake work husband.”

  Anna rolled her eyes to mock his cockiness, but it did give her some comfort to know that she wasn’t prone to falling in love with every man she worked with. “I don’t think so.”

  “No? I would make an awesome fake husband. Just like I was a fabulous fake father all the way from Afghanistan.”

  “I’m doing it, aren’t I? I’m having an actual relationship with him.”

  “You are. And how does it make you feel?”

  “Like a freaking scaredy cat.”

  “That’s it? All
you feel is fear?”

  No, it wasn’t even remotely close to all she felt. Ben made her feel as though there was another person in the world who knew who she really was. Ben knew she started to get cranky when she was tired or hungry and he either made her sleep or fed her. Ben knew she liked to sleep on the right side of the bed so he slept on the left. Ben knew how she liked to be kissed and touched. Ben knew what her favorite maternity shirt was and that she secretly liked the name Gertrude for a girl, although he refused to allow his daughter to be named that.

  Ben made her feel safe when she slept in his arms. Ben made her feel happy when she woke up and he was still there. Ben made love to her as though, even with her round body, she was still the sexiest woman he’d ever laid eyes on.

  No wonder she was so scared. For six years he’d been her world and what she felt for him then was a mere fraction of what she felt for him now. Which made the idea of him not feeling the same way about her so much more daunting.

  Yes, he cared for her. Yes, he wanted her. But did he need her? Did he get heart palpations at the idea of her not being in his life? It seemed very uncharacteristic of Ben to truly need anyone.

  “Has he told you he loves you?”

  “Ha!” Anna snorted. “Ben? Feelings? You met him, right? No. Don’t get romantic on me, Mark. We’re both realists. Ben doesn’t want to move in with me because he loves me. He wants to move in with me because he sees it as the next step in his plan to get me to marry him. Because that’s what he wants. The kid and me in that order. He thinks moving in will get him to marriage that much faster and he thinks marriage is the most secure way to lock it all up. He’s being expedient, that’s all. First he gets me to forgive him, then he gets me to date him, then have sex with him, now he wants me to live with him… This must have been how the Germans felt when they knew Patton was on the other side of the battlefield.”

  “Resistance does sound futile.” Mark pinched the last dumpling from the container and popped it in his mouth.

  “Was that the last dumpling? Did you seriously eat the last dumpling when there is a pregnant woman in the vicinity?”

  “Snooze, lose. Besides, I thought the quart of pork lo mein and the twelve dumplings you already had would have been enough. No?”

  Anna patted her stomach. “Well, it does leave me room for dessert.”

  “Stop changing the subject. What are you going to do about Ben?”

  “I’m probably going to lose.” Hell, she’d already lost. The idea of going home tonight and him not being there was unimaginable. He was making her ridiculously happy, and she simply had to find a way to deal with the fear.

  “Probably?”

  “Definitely. He’ll win. I’ll cave. It will take a few months, but I’ll start to realize he doesn’t feel about me the way I feel about him and I’ll have my heart crushed.”

  “Honestly, though, is a lifetime of a one-sided love really that long to endure?”

  Anna knew Mark was teasing her, but she wanted to kill him right now. Or at least wipe the smug look off his face.

  “Listen, all kidding aside, I think you’re not giving Ben enough credit. Forget the fact that the guy bought you a house in case he died. I’ve known him a long time, too, and I never once saw him lose his control. The night he broke his own rule and knocked you up…that’s unprecedented.”

  Was it? When he thought he might die? The bottom line was that Anna was afraid it no longer mattered. Letting him go, or trying to walk away from him a second time didn’t seem humanly possible.

  “It doesn’t matter. I know what’s coming, but I’m not quite willing to surrender the battle yet. If he wants to move in with me, then he’s going to have wait until I’m ready. Besides, he’s got this really ugly sofa in his home office that I know he’ll want to bring with him and I hate it.”

  Not the memories on it, of course. Those were precious. But the couch looked like an overstuffed piece of beige nothingness.

  “There’s a reason to put your life in stasis. You don’t like his taste in furniture.”

  She glared at Mark. “If you hadn’t eaten the last dumpling, I would have thrown it at you.”

  “Yeah, right. As if you would waste the food.”

  “Okay, well, how about we move on to another topic. Have you made any progress finding my birth parents?”

  “Absolutely. I’ve got several leads. I’m tracking them down and making excellent progress.”

  “Are you lying?”

  “Yes. You know that’s what I say to all my clients when I’ve got zilch. I’ve been tied up with the Anderson case. Because it was a high-profile cold case, the sheriff of Montgomery County was anxious to have my input. I feel like I had to put my energies there first.”

  “No, of course. You did great work on that case. Based on what you found the coroner confirmed it wasn’t a suicide as previously thought. Sally Anderson was murdered and now she has a chance for justice.”

  “If the sheriff or I can find her killer. The trail is like an iceberg at this point.”

  “You’ll do it.”

  “Such confidence. But I guess that’s what I do…bring justice to the masses.”

  He was laughing at himself in a self-deprecating way, but Anna didn’t discount the importance of Mark’s successes. “You know you might consider telling Sophie about some of the work you’ve done and, more importantly, some of the cases you’ve solved.”

  “You think she would listen?”

  “I think if I was a girl who didn’t know her father—oh, wait, I am that girl—and I learned he was one of the good guys, then, yeah, that might make a difference.”

  “Is that why you are anxious to find them? Because you’re hoping they might be good guys in the end?”

  No, Anna couldn’t expect that. She knew her father had left before her mother abandoned her so that automatically ruled him out of the good-guy category. Then knowing what her mother was and what her mother did, Anna didn’t think there could be a happy ending in any of this. She simply had this need to know what happened. Maybe so she could have certainty that it couldn’t happen again. Not to her child anyway.

  “Not anxious…only curious I guess. I went so long without thinking about them at all. Now that I’ve made the decision to do this I can’t seem to stop thinking about them. Or maybe it’s the baby thing.”

  “I promise I’ll let you know when I have something. So, I take it that means Ben hasn’t found anything, either? That’s surprising considering I’ve given him a massive head start.”

  A fact not entirely lost on Anna. “Nope. He says everything has led to dead ends but…”

  “What?”

  She hesitated in answering. Really, all she had was a gut feeling, and lately her gut was so messed up between Ben and the baby she didn’t know if she was coming or going. The other night she’d spent two hours folding and refolding Onesies in different drawers to see which one of them she liked better for the purpose of storing Onesies. It was a little insane.

  At one point she’d thought she was losing her mind until Ben came in and showed her the chapter on nesting and explained what she felt was a biological imperative and that her behavior was perfectly natural.

  Right. So now biology was running her brain. No doubt she was completely wrong about her suspicions.

  “I don’t know.” She struggled to verbalize what she actually thought. “It’s like he’s holding back something. I know he was an operative and that should have made him skilled at being sneaky—”

  “Ben wasn’t trained in sneaky. Not his particular specialty.”

  “It’s just that any time I bring up the subject he gives a terse reply and changes the topic. Maybe sneaky is the wrong word but evasive fits.”

  “Well, I can assure you, I am excellent at my job and I haven’t turned up anything yet. The names are a dead end. The play on combination of names is a dead end. I’ll head out to the hospital where you were born and see what I can find there and l
et you know how that turns out.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “You’re welcome. So should we get back to work?”

  Their lunch hour had become more of a lunch afternoon. She probably should accomplish something for him, given that he was tracking down her parents for free.

  “There are some payables I can process.”

  “That’s sounds so assistant of you. I love it!”

  “But—”

  “What?”

  Anna’s stomach grumbled. “I think I would rather get some dessert first. Ice cream breaks?”

  Mark’s jaw dropped. “You can’t be serious. This kid is going to weigh fifty pounds on the way out.”

  “It’s just that I—”

  “Need it. Yes. Ice cream. Go. Then come back and get those payable things…done, filed, whatever.”

  Anna pushed herself out of her chair belly first. She leaned down and brushed his cheek with a light kiss. “Thanks for everything, boss. I mean it.”

  “Sure you don’t want to ditch Ben and make me the new object of your affections?”

  “I’m sure. But you do make an excellent sounding board. Make sure Sophie knows that about you. It could change a lot.”

  Having stalled on a lead in the Anderson case, Mark decided to make good on his promise to Anna to track her parents more aggressively. The truth was, once he knew Ben was pursuing the matter, he didn’t see much point. After all, Ben had more at stake. Finding Anna’s parents would be one more way for him to impress her and win the girl.

  Except that he hadn’t. At least not yet.

  Mark went to the Holy Mercy hospital and found the administration floor in the basement. The single person working behind the counter was a girl who appeared as though she was barely out of high school. She put down her nail file as soon as he approached her desk.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Yes, I’m looking for help with a birth certificate that was filed from this hospital. The names on the certificate were actually falsified and I’m trying to find out how that could have happened.”