Page 81 of Pregnant By the Playboy

She leads me to a room that’s smaller than the one we were in before dinner. She sits on the couch and I take an armchair.

“How’s the pregnancy going?” she asks.

“Not too bad. I’m just hungry all the time.”

She nods sympathetically. “Has your morning sickness passed?”

“More or less, yeah.”

She rests her elbow on the arm of the couch and puts her head in her hand. “What’s Vince like in a relationship? I’m curious.”

“Oh,” I say. “He’s nice.”

“Nice. It’s not the word people usually use to describe Vince, but I know what you mean. Kind of a bland description, though.” She raises her eyebrows.

What does she want me to tell her?

“He took me out for mocktails, and he’d been to the place beforehand and tried half the menu so he could tell me what was good.”

Courtney giggles. “Yeah?”

I start to relax. She doesn’t want dirt on Vince, nor is she interrogating me to make sure I’m good enough for her husband’s family. I feel younger than I am, like we’re two girls giggling over boys.

“I always thought Vince just needed to meet the right woman,” she says.

I hesitate. “I feel like I’m supposed to save him.”

I’m glad I talked to Vince about it last weekend, but this is the first time I’ve voiced that fear to anyone else.

She tilts her head. “What do you mean?”

“Like, he wants me and the baby to be his whole purpose in life, and I’m afraid I’ll disappoint him. I think he needs something in addition to taking care of us.”

Courtney opens her mouth, but then Julian walks into the room, carrying Evie in a detachable car seat.

“Why, hello!” Courtney coos. “Is it bedtime?”

Evie makes a bunch of loud noises.

“That’s okay,” Courtney says. “Daddy will sing you a song, and you’ll go right to sleep. You always say you won’t, but you do. Usually, anyway.”

Julian sits down in an armchair, Evie on the floor in front of him, and he leans over and starts singing to her in Cantonese. Courtney watches them with a fond smile. Julian really is sweet with his daughter, and I’m sure she has him wrapped around her little finger.

He’s singing something about a mosquito, then a cat.

And the weird thing is...I know this song.

I shut my eyes and try to remember. Someone sang this to me. I think it was a man’s voice, though not as low as Julian’s.

But there weren’t any men who looked after me. There was just my mother, and two other women in the building who’d take care of me while she worked. The only man...

Oh my God.

I remember him.

I thought I only remembered his funeral, and everything else I’d reconstructed from what my mother told me over the years.

But I do remember my father.