Well, this is the last chapter …

Still holding her right hand, Max reached up and gently prised the other from her head, bringing both to her lap and giving her little alternative but to look down at him.

"I thought you'd agreed to put that shirt out for charity."

"What? Why?" Max was completely bewildered by her random comment. He looked down at his chest. "What's wrong with it?"

"It's too tight. The buttons look like they are about to pop when you puff yourself up."

"Puff myself up? What do you mean?" He narrowed his eyes, recognising what she was doing. "Are you trying to change the subject?"

She pulled her hands away and rubbed each arm. "I don't like this subject anymore, don't want to talk about it. I think I'd just like to go home" she mumbled.

Noticing how she was flinching at her own touch he asked, "are you okay?"

"Yeah, but the bruises will show tomorrow."

"Did Sumner … Mike hurt you?"

"Only this arm a bit, you did this." She showed him first the marks on her wrist "and this," then pushing up her sleeve, her other upper arm. He traced his fingers over the faintly coloured patches of skin. "You know I bruise easily" her voice little more than a whisper as his caress began to ease the soreness and melt her defences.

"Yeah. I'm sorry. Sorry about a lot of things today."

"Why? You were right. I should have waited."

After everything they had been through in the previous few hours, Millie's self-doubt tugged at him. "I've never been so terrified as when you got in that car" he admitted softly, "and never so relieved as when you got out of it again. If anything had happened to you …" he couldn't finish the sentence, couldn't form the words that would fix an image in his mind of her lying injured or worse still, dead. "I understand how it feels, you know." Millie did. If there was anyone who knew how she felt, it was him. The undercover operation in Poland had left him haunted by the faces of people who lives he had scarred, and deaths he had permitted.

"I know" she whispered, nodding her head. "I suppose I understand a bit more now as well."

"I wish you didn't" he replied sadly, taking her hands again. "I'd give anything for you not to understand, but you must remember none of this is your fault." She withdrew a hand from his and cupped his cheek, her thumb stroking his skin, now roughened with a day of stubble.

"But I should have listened to you. Maybe someone else could have …"

"No. You did the right thing" he conceded, "even if it doesn't seem that way at the moment. Does any of this sound familiar?" Millie smile was tinged with sorrow. His words were indeed familiar, she had spent months convincing him of much the same thing. Neither spoke for a while, the skin to skin contact saying everything that needed to be said. Eventually though, he couldn't contain his anxiety at her niggling words that had been eating away at him for the past few hours any longer. "You … you said something earlier" he broke off, not knowing how to ask her without sounding trivial or self-obsessed.

"Go on" she prompted gently.

"You said, outside The Fox … you said that you didn't know what you saw in me." He cringed at just how petty he sounded, but there, it was done now and it was up to her to explain, he'd just have to take it.

"Did I?"

He nodded.

"Oh yeah. Well, you can be infuriating … and insensitive… and judgemental, but then you smile at me… I couldn't imagine you being any other way and I don't want you any other way. I love you," she placed a hand on his chest, "all of you, good and bad." Pausing momentarily, it seemed the right moment to tell him about her decision. "But this isn't going to work." Max stopped breathing. "I've been doing a lot of thinking over the last few weeks, especially the last couple of days. I've decided … I'm going to request a transfer." Max exhaled his held breath loudly in relief that she hadn't told him that they were over, but his apprehension resurfaced immediately.

"Why? Where to?"

"We can't keep avoiding each other here forever. And I certainly don't think we can work alongside each other."

"Yes we can!"

Millie looked at him reproachfully. "Only if that means you confine me to the station to trawl through CCTV for you. Or bring you files and coffee all day. I can't and won't do that." Max hung his head with a degree of shame, her assessment of him was, as usual, correct. "I was thinking, maybe I could go to Barton Street, or Stafford Row. Still in Canley, just not in the same station."

"But we wouldn't see each other, sometimes for days" panic spread in him. Perhaps she was trying to put some distance between them after all.

"Well, that was the other thing I was thinking about. I wondered, and say no if it's not the right time, or anything, but …" she chewed her lip anxiously.

"But what?"

"I wondered if you would like to move in with me. I suppose it'd mean everyone will end up knowing about us before long, but if we weren't working together, it wouldn't really matter any more, would it?"

Max stared at her in stunned silence before breaking out into one of the rarest of things, an ecstatic, joyful smile. Millie basked in the heat of that smile, finally feeling warmth again.

"I thought you were going to finish with me."

"How could you think that Max? I just told you -" but he interrupted her, pulling her down for a slow tender kiss. Coming up for air a while later they rested their foreheads against each other, the earlier trauma fading. "Well?" she breathed, "you haven't answered my question." Max was just about to reply when a loud knock on the door burst their bubble.

"Shit" he muttered looking up to see Jo peering through the blind from outside, "we need to finish this later, but yes." He tried to bounce back to a standing position, but stiffness from crouching at Millie's feet for so long had set into his legs that he nearly lost his balance as he yelled out for Jo to enter.

"Bones getting old?" teased Millie under her breath.

Max was gratified to note that if Jo suspected anything unusual had been going on, she wasn't showing it. Instead, her expression was professional, if grave.

"What is it Jo?" asked Max as behind him Millie stood, needing to stretch her own legs.

"Something you probably ought to know has come up, not that it makes a lot of difference now ..." she trailed off, looking nervously at Millie who had taken up Max's former position against the filing cabinet.

"Well?" Max was getting tired. He just wanted to take Millie home, put her in a hot bath and then make love to her. He couldn't think of a better way to distract her from the day's events.

"I've just heard from Danny Bryden. If he is telling the truth, and I've no reason to suspect otherwise having spoken to him for quite a while, he's certainly no fan of Lisa Sumner by the way, there's no way he could have been the father of that baby. Danny contracted mumps when he was twenty-two, wasn't inoculated as a child, which left him sterile. He told me that we're welcome to check his medical records, so either Lisa slept with someone else or she lied and –"

"Mike was the father all along" interjected Millie weakly. "She is the image of him."

Max watched Jo grow concerned as Millie spoke. He spun round and crossed the distance in an instant. Just as Millie's knees buckled beneath her, he caught her for the second time in as many hours. She crumpled against his body, allowing him to take her weight. She'd started to come to terms with Mike's death albeit knowing that it would be a long time before the sadness she felt abated. But now, now knowing it was because of a cruel lie? She felt crushed by the pointlessness of it all. "Abby was his all along."

"We can't know that for sure."

"I do. I know."

"But it doesn't change anything." Max held her tightly, nodding at Jo over her head to leave. Jo took the hint quietly, any satisfaction she might have derived from uncovering Max and Millie's secret obliterated by Millie's devastation at the news she had brought.

"Why do people lie, Max?"

"I don't know."

He lied.