The First Move Page 5

  When she started to pull away, he didn’t fight her. She let him lead her to a small table and sat when he put a little pressure on her shoulders. She drank when he pushed the coffee cup across the table at her.

  Wrinkling her nose in disgust was her first independent action. “It’s too cold.”

  “You took the lid off.”

  “It’s always too hot otherwise.”

  Her pickiness charmed him, more so than the calming politeness from Cathy’s wedding ever could. “I never imagined you for a Goldilocks.”

  Her smile was feeble, but existent, which was good enough. “Probably more Princess and the Pea than Goldilocks.”

  “Well, princess, it’s lunchtime and you can’t tell me what happened on an empty stomach.”

  She traced her finger around the lip of her cup, but didn’t reply.

  “No mention of a date again. Just me feeding you because it’s mealtime.” He held up his hands and wiggled his fingers. “I’ll keep my ulterior motives to myself.”

  Her lips twitched, but she didn’t say anything. Her grumbling stomach answered for her.

  “Do you have any appointments this afternoon?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll take you to Reza’s Grill. It’s not too loud, and we can get a beer. You can tell me about your daughter.”

  When she took several struggling breaths to stave off more tears, Miles knew he was right.

  Shit. Rey had a daughter. If his assumptions were true and he was doing the math right, she’d gotten pregnant the year she’d disappeared from Chicago. The girl on the phone might even be the reason she’d left high school. How long had he watched her, imagined he knew her better than any of the cool kids whose parties she went to because he thought he loved her, without noticing that the sadness in her eyes had changed to fear and confusion?

  He hadn’t known her at all. He’d been no better than any of the boys who used her, assigning a fantasy to her that fit his own needs. Little had Miles known that part of the faraway look in her eyes at Cathy’s wedding was loss.

  “I need to find her.”

  Miles put a hand on her forearm. “Even if you teleport yourself to Cincinnati, you won’t find her there. Not by going there and wandering around looking for a woman in a red T-shirt, even a red Ohio State T-shirt. We need to create a strategy both for looking for her and for getting her to call you back.”

  “She might call back.” She breathed the words out with no sound. More forcefully, she said, “I can’t leave.”

  “I’ll go get lunch and bring it back. What do you want?”

  She returned his question with a blank stare.

  Right. She wasn’t thinking about her taste buds. She was thinking about her daughter. He’d eat paste topped with dog shit and not taste a thing if their situations were reversed.

  “Can you at least promise me that you won’t leave before I get back?”

  “Yes.”

  Miles thought about calling someone to sit with her, but her anxious stare at the phone dissuaded him. Until she could rule out the possibility her daughter wasn’t calling back, Rey wasn’t going anywhere.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  MILES RETURNED WITH sacks of food.

  Renia dutifully ate what he pushed toward her, tasting nothing.

  Swallowing was difficult with the elephant sitting on her chest, constricting her ribs and pressing down on her heart. Her stomach stopped growling, which eased some of her physical discomfort. The food didn’t do anything for her emotional well-being.

  The phone rang once. It wasn’t her daughter. Her daughter whose name she didn’t know.

  Miles had asked the man on the phone about a woman with brown hair and brown eyes, but her daughter’s father had blond hair and blue eyes. The only photos she had were from the day she was delivered. The nurses put her baby girl in her arms and let her say goodbye. Aunt Maria had snapped the pictures.

  Giving away her daughter had been so easy. By giving her baby up for adoption, she had done the right thing. Everyone knew it. She had known it. She had been sixteen. Her boyfriend Vince’s only skill had been getting alcohol for other underage drinkers. A profitable occupation, sure, but not one that would support a child.

  She’d never met the adoptive parents. Hadn’t wanted to. Aunt Maria had vetted the parents, found a lawyer to handle the contract, done everything. When Aunt Maria had arranged for Renia’s daughter to get “identifying information” about her at the age of eighteen, she hadn’t argued. The only thing she had insisted on, as much as any sixteen-year-old was able to contractually insist on anything, was that she didn’t want identifying information about her daughter and the adoptive parents. With one parent dead herself, Renia had understood a child’s desire to know her relatives.

  What she’d been too young to understand was a parent’s desire to know her child.

  Three days ago, when she’d talked to Tilly on the phone, she’d not been able to say whether or not she wanted the phone call from her daughter. Forty percent of her had desperately wanted the call. Another 40 percent had desperately not wanted the call. The other 20 percent was too scared shitless about the call to have an opinion.

  Now she’d gotten the phone call and the scared-shitless part of her had answered. The voice on the phone had pronounced her name so carefully Renia could envision an eighteen-year-old version of herself standing in front of a mirror watching her lips as they formed foreign words. She wondered who could possibly be calling her and speaking so tentatively over the phone. When the voice—her daughter—had finally said, “I think you’re my mother,” the scared-shitless part had hung up on her.

  Immediately, Renia was 100 percent certain the answer she gave was the wrong answer and now the only contact information she had for her daughter was the number to a pay phone in a mall in Cincinnati.

  Brown paper bags crinkled as Miles cleaned up the remains of lunch and threw the wrappers away. He made other noises, water poured out of the faucet and her electric kettle whistled, but the phone still didn’t ring. When he pushed a mug of hot tea under her nose, Renia didn’t know whether to splash it up in his face or give him a hug for taking care of her. While she made up her mind, he shrugged, set the mug on the table and returned to his seat.

  Damn him for being so calm.

  “Tell me about your daughter,” he said.

  “I don’t know anything about my daughter.” The elephant danced on bits of her broken heart, stomping the organ into a red smear inside her chest.

  His eyes were compassionate as he looked over the rim of his mug and sipped his tea. The ceramic clinked on the wood table when he set his cup down. “Tell me how it is that you have a daughter.”

  “The same way you have a daughter. I had sex.” She grabbed at her mug and gulped tea, which immediately made her cough. “That was really hot,” she accused with a glare, then coughed again.

  “Sip it, maybe it will stop you from coughing.”

  She sipped. It was Darjeeling tea. Did she have Darjeeling tea?

  “Better?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, the tea seemed to burn some life back into you. We’ll create a strategy to find your daughter, but tell me everything you know about her first.” Renia opened her mouth to reiterate she didn’t know anything, but Miles held his hand up. “Anything you know about how she was adopted, where, anything could be helpful.”

  “Um...” She’d never told
this story to anyone. Where did she start? “I was not a good kid in school.”

  She adjusted her head from side to side to keep the bleak emotions of her memories from gripping their talons into her brain—the gaping, bottomless hole in her heart after a drunk had killed three members of her family. And the cold anger she was old enough to feel, but not mature enough to manage. The first year after the accident, the nuns passed her because they felt sorry for her, but they wouldn’t let her stay in Catholic school. She passed from a freshman to a sophomore at public school after her grandmother intervened. Her sophomore year, not even Babunia could save her.

  “I got pregnant my sophomore year of high school and was expelled.” Not necessarily for being pregnant, but he didn’t need to know the details about why she hadn’t been a good kid. “My mom, um—” she looked out the window, over Miles’s shoulder “—she said she couldn’t deal with my grief and her grief at the same time, and if I couldn’t learn to control myself, I would have to live somewhere else.”

  The late summer sun had faded as she looked out the window of her mother’s kitchen....

  Her mother, hands covering her face, sat at the table arguing with Babunia. Renia, four months pregnant, still no belly to speak of and only morning sickness to remind her of the baby, stood by the refrigerator, unwilling to participate in the conversation and unable to pull herself away.

  “If she can’t keep herself out of trouble, I won’t have her in this house.” Her mother cried all the time, but didn’t shed a single tear at the thought of kicking Renia out.

  “She’s your daughter. She’s Pawel’s daughter. If you can’t look past your grief to care for your sake, try caring for his.”

  “If he cared so much about us, he wouldn’t have died.”

  “God had other plans for them.”

  “Don’t talk to me about God,” her mom said, slamming her hands on the table. “God took my son and my husband. He took your husband, too. Why aren’t you angry?”

  “It’s been three years. You have three other children to take care of.”

  And Tilly, the baby of the family, sat out of view of their mother, hugging her knees and crying silently.

  Renia coughed and took a sip of her tea, allowing the warmth to force her mind back to the present. She turned her gaze back to Miles. “My grandmother arranged for me to live with my aunt Maria and her partner in Cincinnati. My daughter was born on August third. I gave her up for adoption, then stayed on with my aunt and started my sophomore year of high school over.”

  “I wondered why you left. There were rumors, but most were too wild to credit.”

  “Who are you?”

  He smiled his characteristic self-mocking smile. “I’d pretend to be hurt that you don’t remember me, but it’s been clear since Cathy’s wedding you have no idea who I am. I went to high school with you. I was in your freshman and sophomore year English classes.”

  Miles Brislenn. Miles Brislenn. Miles Brislenn. She ran the name through her head several times and still came up blank. She shrugged.

  “We weren’t really in any of the same clubs,” he said.

  “I wasn’t in any clubs.” In Chicago, she’d been too concerned with degrading herself to be interested in anything else. In Cincinnati, Renia had looked at the kids like the ones she’d hung out with in Chicago and remembered the pain of the delivery room. She liked the party kids, but that route had led to a bad end. And she’d promised Aunt Maria no more partying.

  Not sure what to say to the other kids, Renia hadn’t made a single friend during her three years in Cincinnati. They had been the loneliest three years of her life, but she’d not smoked a cigarette, taken a drink or had sex, so the years were a success. And she had graduated from high school—another success.

  “Even if you had been in clubs, they wouldn’t have been the same ones I was in. I don’t think you’re the math club type.”

  “You were a dork?”

  He raised an eyebrow at her and she laughed. Then the hard metal band around her heart snapped and her laughter turned into gulping tears. Miles didn’t try to stop her from crying. He got out of his chair, knelt beside her and held her hand until the worst of her sobbing had passed.

  When she was done, he squeezed her hand and said “We’ll find her” so convincingly she had no choice but to believe him. She sipped her cold tea while he returned to his seat. Instead of sitting across the small table from Renia, he brought his chair next to hers and rested his hand on her knee.

  “Do you know who the adoptive parents are?”

  “No. I didn’t want to know, so I insisted on an agreement where I couldn’t find out. And when my aunt Maria said she’d put a provision in the contract so I could find my daughter if I wanted to, later, after she turned eighteen, I said I would tell the hospital I wanted to keep my baby and was being forced into adoption. So there was only a provision made for my daughter to learn about me. If she wanted.”

  “The time you took off work was her eighteenth birthday.”

  “Yes.”

  “Does your aunt know? About the adoptive parents, I mean.”

  “She does. She picked them out, but is somewhere in India on a dream vacation with her partner. I can email her, and she might get it when she checks her email. If she checks her email.”

  “The lawyer who negotiated the contract?”

  “I think she’s still in business. My mom would have her contact information.” Could she get Tilly to get the information? Too cowardly. This was her baby. She could call her mom.

  “Okay. You start there and see if you can contact her parents.”

  She flinched. Her daughter had parents and Renia was just an extra womb.

  If Miles noticed her reaction, he didn’t let on. “Could your brother help us?”

  “Maybe, but he wouldn’t. He’s very sensitive about anything that hints at corruption or abuse of power.”

  “Even for his sister?”

  “Especially for family.” Karl blamed many people for the deaths of his father, brother and grandfather, but he placed the majority of the blame on the state employee who’d accepted a bribe in exchange for a driver’s license.

  “I’m sure there are registries online for adoptees searching for their parents,” Miles said. “She’s young, so she would go to the internet first. Maybe someone else knows who she is and would see a classified ad. A Craigslist ad is free and we could put an ad in the newspapers. We can include the studio’s phone number and forward the phone to your cell so you can answer it anytime.”

  She nodded as she wrote down his ideas, staying focused on the positive. They were making a list of steps she could take, steps that might mean she had another chance to talk to her daughter. Anything was better than thinking about how she’d hung up on her baby.

  She took a deep breath and exhaled the negative thoughts. Negative thoughts would cripple her.

  He grasped her chin in his hand and turned her face toward his. “Hey—” he smiled “—you feeling better about this?”

  “Yes.” She nodded. “Lots.” She had a list of things to do, and not one of them was “sit by the phone and cry.”

  “Good,” he said. She could tell by the way he was looking at her lips that he wanted to kiss her and by the hesitation in his eyes that he didn’t know if he should.

  Desperate for oblivion, she saved him the trouble of deciding.

  His lips were soft, contrasting wi
th his stubble, which scraped against her chin when she cocked her head and deepened the kiss. He moved one hand to her knee, but no matter how hard she wished it, his hand never snuck up from her knee to her thighs, his fingers never reached under her skirt to trail his fingertips against her bare skin. She wrapped her hands around his waist as she pulled herself closer to him and slipped her tongue into his mouth, desperate for the contact.

  Renia could lose herself in the touch of another person. The tingling of her body when his hands walked their way up the inside of her thighs and under her panties would drown out her emotions until there was nothing left but pleasure. She wasn’t fifteen anymore. She knew how to have sex for all the wrong reasons and still make it pleasurable.

  Miles moaned when she pulled his shirt up and drew patterns on his back with her fingernails, but he seized her fingers when they circled around to the front and tried to unbutton his shirt. Fine. She moved her hands lower and fumbled with his belt buckle. His shirt didn’t need to be undone for her to forget her problems. She squeezed her thighs together, frustration pulsing through her body, aching for release. An orgasm would be as good as a sob. Better, because she could pretend to be happy when crying out.

  Miles broke the kiss, leaving Renia leaning forward in her chair, her mouth parted and her hands awkwardly stopped at his fly. “I said I’d keep my ulterior motives to myself.” He smiled and swiped her lower lip with his thumb. “A dumb thing for me to promise, but maybe I’ll renege on it later.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THEY SPLIT THE duties.

  Miles tapped away on Renia’s work computer, setting up a profile for different adoption registries and creating a Craigslist ad. Renia took the hard job and called her mom. An uncomfortable conversation would take her mind off the embarrassment of being rebuffed—and the realization that one jar to her hard-fought emotional balance and she slipped into her old ways of using sex to forget her pain. Was that better or worse than only having sex with men who didn’t ask personal questions?