She sighed. “Yes, there was. I guess maybe Bob’s holier-than-thou attitude pushed me over the edge, but the blow-up’s been coming since the moment I stepped off the plane. I should never have come here, Li Yan. I came for all the wrong reasons—to escape the mess of my life back home, not because I wanted to come to China. And Bob was absolutely right. I didn’t take the interest I should have, I didn’t prepare properly. I arrived with all the baggage of popular paranoid American propaganda about China and communism—and a completely closed mind.” She glanced at him across the Jeep and smiled ruefully. “If I hadn’t met you, if you hadn’t challenged me and forced me to open my eyes and my mind, I would probably have gone through my six weeks here like some kind of automaton, and none of this country would have rubbed off on me. And I’d have gone home the same person I was when I arrived. And the same wasted life would have been waiting for me when I got back. But these four days have changed me. When I go home tomorrow, it’ll be a different me who gets off the plane in Chicago. And I won’t be going back to the same old wasted life. I’ll be starting a new one.” She stared at her hands. “I just wish . . .” But she couldn’t finish what she had started and shrugged, a little hopelessly. “So why did you take me back to your apartment?”

He kept his eyes ahead of him as he circumnavigated the station, turning east at the junction into Chongwenmen Dong Street. He wanted to tell her it was because he needed to be close to her, that he didn’t want to leave her, that just her presence, her scent, in his apartment was worth all the wrath that he knew would pour down on him from above. He said, “With Johnny Ren on the loose I was concerned for your safety.”

“Oh,” she said, somehow disappointed that there wasn’t more to it. “And is that what you told your boss?”

Li nodded. “He wasn’t impressed.”

Margaret bridled. “You know, that’s what gets me about this whole disapproval thing. I spent the night in your apartment, entirely innocently. But they don’t believe it. There’s something prurient about the whole lot of them.”

Li smiled. “And when people think you are guilty, you might as well have had the pleasure of committing the crime.”

Margaret turned and looked at him curiously. “Pleasure?”