PART FIVE - Raisins and Almonds
He sighed, knowing the conversation he'd have to have, knowing how pitiful it was.
"Jack?" He looked up from his desk to see her returning from the cell where they had kept Miss Leigh until together he and Miss Fisher had found the real murderer.
"Still here," Jack told her, and she stepped through the side door of his office and moved to collect two glasses and a bottle from his filing cabinet.
"Poor Miss Leigh," she said. "Saul was lost to her from the moment they met."
As she sat in the chair opposite Jack couldn't help but remember her words from earlier in their investigation. She'd been standing so close to him then, dangerously close. And dangerous words had been spoken from her lips;
"She wouldn't have killed him Jack, she loved him. They were having an affair."
"He was married."
"It happens."
They both knew it happened, married men finding love in women not their wife. They knew it all too well and Miss Fisher had looked at him so clearly, almost as if she was testing him. Poking him with a stick and dangling herself before him to see if he'd rise to the bait, and oh how he longed to. But the thought twisted his stomach and he'd ignored the chance for them to finally have that discussion, and instead tried to insist such an affair only gave Miss Leigh more motive.
"I've been contemplating," Jack said, forcing his thoughts back to the present, "What to write to his wife."
Miss Fisher looked at him, and then dropped her gaze to pour them each a much needed drink. "Five years and half a world apart," she said. "What kind of a marriage can survive that?"
This, Jack realised, was his chance.
"I went to war a newlywed."
"But you came home." She looked at him significantly as she passed his glass across the desk.
Jack couldn't look at her. He needed to say these things he knew, but the war and his wife- they were topics he'd been trying to avoid, for longer than Miss Fisher's return in his life, but stronger than ever these last weeks.
"Not the man my wife married," he said, shaking his head slightly, "Sixteen years ago."
"War will do that to you."
"My wife's been living with her sister for some time now."
His eyes did not meet hers, but he didn't need to look to know she was staring. He could feel her eyes on him as sharp as anything, a question hanging suddenly in the air between them.
Jack sighed, looking to his hands. "But a marriage is still a marriage, Miss Fisher." He cautioned a glance upward and knew in a moment that Phryne understood.
He was telling her it could not be talked of. Not be rekindled. They may have found each other again, but his honour, his wife; they held him back, despite the circumstances.
"Especially to a man of honour," She offered him a small smile and raised her glass.
It was strange, he thought, how much this felt like losing her again. But they met glasses and drank. Phryne replaced her glass to his desk and stood, moving to his office door and only looking back to him, her Jack, for one more fleeting glance.
She had survived ten years without him at all, she reasoned, she could survive to be his colleague, his partner in only crime. Of course she could, she was Phryne Fisher. And she had sworn to herself a long time ago she would never let herself need a man again.
But, the back of her mind reminded her, that promise had been made after she had loved and lost Jack Robinson.