Jean stood beside Lucien, holding her head high, reminding herself that she was a doctor's wife now, that she had strength and dignity and nothing could take that from her. But whatever she told herself was ineffective against the tower of criticism that was Nancy Donnelly. Jean hadn't told Lucien everything about Nancy. She'd told him she hadn't known Nancy well, which was true. But she had not told him that she had gone to school a year behind Nancy Donnelly, and Nancy Donnelly had a few other little friends who saw little Jean Randall with her dirt-stained skirts and old shoes and took great pleasure mercilessly mocking the farm girl.

Such insults were childish, of course, and Jean had grown out of the shame caused by her humble upbringing. But perhaps Nancy had affected Jean more than she wanted to believe. Perhaps those taunts were in the back of her mind when Jean made sure her fingernails were always perfectly painted—despite the amount of labor that meant her polish was often chipped and needed to be redone every few days—and when she made sure her hair was meticulously put into rollers before she went to sleep each night. Perhaps Jean heard Nancy's voice in her head when she did the laundry twice each week to ensure the clothes were clean and when she scrubbed the whole house to be absolutely positive that no there wouldn't be any dirt invading their home. Perhaps Jean's dignity was borne of self-preservation more than anything else.

"Frank, what have we got?" Lucien asked, walking over to see the Chief Superintendent.

"Stabbing," he replied, standing up to greet the Blakes. Frank kept his tone low to avoid the crowds from overhearing.

"Who is he?" Jean asked, looking down to see the bloodied victim whose face she did not recognize.

"Reggie Wallace. From Mildura by way of Melbourne. Supposedly in Ballarat on business with his girlfriend."

Lucien immediately looked over to where Nancy Donnelly was speaking to Bill Hobart. Her face was pale and her body seemed to shiver with anxiety. "That's the girlfriend?"

Frank nodded. "Nancy Donnelly."

"Yes, I've heard of Ms. Donnelly. She's an eyewitness, I assume?"

"Actually, she's our main suspect. Bill's trying to calm her down."

"Bill Hobart?" Jean asked in slight surprise. Bill Hobart was certainly not a man to be relied upon to calm down a frightened woman.

"We don't want her to cause too much of a scene before we arrest her," Frank explained quietly.

Lucien bent down to look at the body. Blood had seeped out all over Reggie Wallace's abdomen, staining his clothes a red so dark, it was nearly black. "You think she stabbed him?"

"One of the shopkeepers made the call when he heard a man yell and then a woman scream, told Ned he saw a blonde woman leaning over a body and crying quite loudly. And when Ned came, Nancy Donnelly was standing there holding the knife. Only she claims she didn't do it," Frank told them.

With a nod, Lucien gave a plan of action. "The body can go to the morgue. I'd like to make sure that the wounds match up with the theory that Nancy stabbed him. Jean, could you speak with her? Make sure she goes to the station quietly?"

That was the last thing Jean wanted to do, but she wanted to help, and so she agreed with Lucien's request. She made her way over to Bill and pasted a kind expression on her face. "Ms. Donnelly, I'm Mrs. Blake," she said softly.

Bill shook his head. "She's not talking. Ned said she was muttering that she didn't do it when he arrived, but by the time we all arrived, she'd clammed up."

But that did not deter Jean. Even if she did feel a surge of irrational annoyance at the fact that a woman who had allegedly stabbed her boyfriend—or at the very least found her stabbed boyfriend and pulled a knife out of his body—could have not one hair out of place nor a single indication of smeared lipstick. "Ms. Donnelly, do you think you can tell me what happened?"

Nancy's eyes darted to Jean's and narrowed in recognition. "I know you."

Jean tried to smile politely. "Yes, we both went to school in Ballarat when we were young."

"Oh."

"Can you tell me what happened to Reggie Wallace?" Jean asked again, certainly not wanting to address their personal history any further.

Nancy's lip started to shake again. "Reggie took good care of me. Really good care of me. He was going to buy a house for us. He promised he was going to marry me!"

"Did he go back on his promise?" Jean guessed. "Is that why you stabbed him?"

But Nancy just shook her head. "I didn't do it!" she insisted before she devolved into tears once more.

Jean wished she could just tell the woman to pull herself together and say something coherent, but antagonizing Nancy was the opposite of calming her down. "Okay, that's alright, do you know who did stab him?"

Nancy shook her head again. Through her sobs, she mustered, "I thought he was still breathing but he had the knife stuck in his belly and I wanted to help."

"Alright, it's alright. Try not to cry anymore now, Nancy," Jean said soothingly. "The police want to talk to you so they can find who killed Reggie. Can you go with Sergeant Hobart, please?"

And finally, Nancy agreed. She sniffed back her tears and reached into her handbag for a silk handkerchief to wipe her eyes. Jean helped escort her into the police car.

By that time, Lucien had already gone into the ambulance with the body to begin the initial examination with Alice. He'd left their car with the keys in the glovebox, so she drove herself home.

It was late afternoon, well past teatime, when Jean finally got back to her laundry. Her mind was filled with memories of Nancy Donnelly and questions about her relationship with Reggie Wallace and who on earth would have stabbed him. Hopefully Lucien's examination of the body and the police interview would yield some more information.

Dinnertime during a homicide investigation was always a macabre but wonderful affair, to Jean's mind. Serving home-cooked food to the people she loved while they all discussed theories for murder was strangely nice. Jean knew her input helped Lucien a great deal, and she was pleased to be able to contribute in a meaningful fashion.

"I think the police are right," Lucien said after thanking Jean for the plate of roast she put in front of him.

She smirked. "That's not a usual opinion from you," she teased.

Charlie got them back on track. "So you think Nancy Donnelly could have stabbed him?"

"It's entirely possible. The knife went into a fleshy part of the stomach. Nothing that would take too much strength. And the knife was sharp. A woman of Nancy's size could have easily caused that wound."

Jean frowned. "But where would she get the knife? Nancy's not the sort of person to keep a knife in her purse. And just as importantly, why would she have done it? Surely if a woman was upset enough to murder a man in an alley behind a shop in the middle of the day, it would be provoked. She might have been in shock, certainly, but I don't see how she could insist on her innocence under those circumstances."

Lucien considered that for a moment. "I'll want to speak with Nancy tomorrow. She'll have settled down, surely, and can carry on a proper conversation."

"I'm going to do some digging into Reggie Wallace. No one here except Nancy Donnelly knows him, so there might be an obvious motive we just don't know about yet," Charlie offered.

Jean nodded and went back to eating her supper. She didn't want to believe that even awful Nancy Donnelly could be capable of murder like that, but Jean has also learned through her time working with Lucien on these cases that nearly anyone is capable of murder. And as much as she hoped she could see the better in people, Jean couldn't help but think in the back of her mind that Nancy Donnelly was absolutely capable of murder.

The front door opened as they were finishing up their meal. Mattie called her greetings from the foyer. Jean informed her that she'd kept a plate warm for the district nurse.

"I was just with Matthew Lawson. I'll be monitoring his recovering while he's here," Mattie explained, sitting down with her food.

"And how is he, in your professional opinion?" Lucien asked. "I didn't get a good diagnostic look at him when we went to lunch."

Jean smiled and began clearing the plates while the doctor and nurse spoke. Charlie got up to help wash the dishes. All was well with her little family—such that it was—and Jean was content.

The following morning began much like any other for Jean. The sun peeked through the windows. She glanced at the clock by her bedside telling her it was barely six. There was a bit of time before she needed to be up and starting the day.

And yet for some reason, Jean felt none of her usual determination to start this particular day. She was perfectly comfortable, warm and cozy but not overheated. Her body was fully relaxed, her mind calm and rested. She rolled over onto her back and turned her head toward her husband.

Lucien was usually a restless sleeper, but she'd gotten used to soothing him and sleeping through his tossing and turning. This night had been no different, it seem, for his body was spread out at such odd angles. He had one arm tossed over his head on the pillow and the other resting on top of the duvet. She could feel the edge of his pyjama bottoms brush against her calf, indicating that his legs were splayed out across practically the whole bed.

Such quiet chaos charmed her, for it was so very Lucien. And for that and many other things, she adored him. Never a dull moment, certainly. But it was also that complexity and difficulty that made him so brilliant and compassionate.

Jean freed her arms and gently reached over for Lucien's hand and took it between hers. He emitted a soft noise but did not seem to wake. She indulged in the quiet moment, being able to hold her attention on him without being observed. Rarely, if ever, did she get the opportunity to just look at him without him knowing, without him asking questions or seducing her. None of which she minded, of course, but there was something so special about this early morning study of her husband that Jean treasured.

His hands were always something she'd been drawn to, she knew. As she held one of them and scrutinized it, Jean could see that Lucien had such beautiful hands. The sheer size of his hands was a bit alarming, actually. When he held her close to his body, one of his hands by itself covered nearly the entire expanse of her back. He could almost circle her whole waist with just the circumference of those hands. Massive and powerful, certainly.

Jean traced faint scars on his knuckles, seeing the lingering evidence of the brutality of his hands. Wounds obtained from fights, whether through amateur boxing when he was in school or from combat during the war or from barroom brawls during his lonely drunken years before returning to Ballarat and the period just after he'd arrived.

Her attention then journeyed to his fingers, long and thick but ever so elegant. Fingers that flew over the keys of the piano. Fingers that held a pen and wrote or drew with frightening precision. Fingers that had learned every curve and line of Jean's own body, inside and out.

She brought his hand to her lips and pressed tiny kisses to each of his fingertips, silently thanking God for her husband and his hands. His surgeon hands that had saved countless lives. His musician hands that brought beauty and comfort. His lover hands that had coaxed Jean to ecstasy more times that she could properly fathom. But no matter what his use for them, these were Lucien's hands. And that made them quite the dearest hands in the world to her.

A small glance over to Lucien's face let her know that she was no longer unobserved in her study of him. He propped up his head with his free hand and was watching her hold his hand with a serene smile on his face.

"Good morning," she murmured.

"Good morning," he replied. "See anything interesting?"

Jean knew he was teasing, but she was not in the mood for levity. "Yes, actually. Quite interesting. Most things about you are interesting."

"Even my hand?"

"Especially your hand. Everything about you is mapped out on your hand."

"Is that what you were thinking about just now?"

"Yes. And I was thinking about how dearly I love you."