After a long weekend of rest and fluids and a truly obnoxious number of readings about gumnut babies—Jack seriously contemplated breaking out Shakespeare if only to give his ears a rest, until Phryne rather amusedly pointed out that Puck was not exactly the sort of role model they wanted the boy to emulate before retreating once more—Anthony was on the mend and Jack was never happier to see his office. A situation that was quite happily maintained until he was called to the scene of a suspicious death at just gone three; the initial investigation would take him a good chunk of the evening, a fact that would not have bothered him a few months earlier. He sighed, determined to stop by Wardlow—it was only a short detour on his way back to the station—for some dinner, even if it was just some cold meats and a salad packed in a picnic basket. Better than the pie cart, at least, and if it gave him a chance to see a friendly face, well… there had been easier investigations than a young man who appeared to have died from an opium overdose, and a friendly face would not go amiss.
"I'll meet you at the station in an hour, Mitchell," he said to his newest constable. "Ask around, see if there is anybody in the area who knew our victim, then get a ride back with Collins."
The lanky man nodded; he was coming along in leaps and bounds as a police officer. Jack headed towards the police car, then drove the short distance home; he headed around the side, thinking that if he went through the kitchen he could catch Mr. Butler and arrange for the basket before anything else. The plan was waylaid by the sound of shouting followed by Anthony running towards him, Dot and the Collins children close behind.
"Unc' Sir! Unc' Sir!" shouted Aggie, and Anthony ran at full speed straight into Jack's arms.
"Oof, hello!" Jack said, swinging him up.
"Dat! Dat!"
Jack looked around, trying to see what had excited him so, and found nothing.
"That what, Ant?" he asked.
"Nooo, no dat!" he said, his little face screwed up in concentration. "Dack? Dack! Dack hat! Me hat?"
Anthony seemed to have a particular affinity for Jack's fedora, and Jack passed it over. It tilted rather adorably over his eyes, so all that was left was the edge of his curls and his mouth and defiant little chin. The brim of the hat bumped against Jack's cheek as Anthony leaned in to give him a kiss, causing Jack to wonder—just briefly, and with Phryne's recent concerns bringing it to mind—what it would have been like to be greeted by his own child. Not, he supposed, like this; he gave his head a shake. Idle speculation, that was all.
"Evening, Mrs. Collins," he said. Remembering Phryne's recent insinuation, he gave her a quick glance—her cheeks were slightly rosier than usual, but that could easily be explained by an afternoon spent out of doors with three young children. "I'm afraid Hugh might be late home this evening, but I'll try not to keep him for too long. I'm just stopping by for dinner."
"Of course, inspector. If you can spare ten minutes, I can run home and organise some food for him?"
"Don't go through any trouble, Mrs. Collins. Somehow I expect that Mr. Butler will pack enough for myself, Hugh, and Constable Mitchell with plenty to spare."
"In that case, I might head home," Dot smiled. "Aggie and Theo need their baths before they fall asleep. We've had a very busy day, haven't we children?"
Theo stuck his fist in his mouth, and Aggie began to dance. Anthony gripped harder to Jack before nodding solemnly, so sweetly shy that Jack couldn't help but chuckle. Dot cocked her head slightly, watching the boy.
"He's the queerest little child," she said. "He's darling, don't get me wrong, but he's so…"
"Solemn?"
"Lost," Dot replied. "Not always, but there's a look in his eyes. Perhaps it's just my own fancy."
"He'd certainly struggle to live up to Miss Agnes and her confidence," Jack said with a laugh, motioning the girl with his head. She was dancing and applauding and dancing again, a whirling dervish of energy Jack was happy to see and even happier to see off home. "But he's been so quietly resilient through this whole ordeal…"
Jack trailed off, not quite sure what to say. Anthony was a sweet boy, but Dot was right—he was a slightly odd little duck, shaped by the circumstances in his life.
"I would never say this to Miss Phryne," Dot confided, "but I am glad she took him in, for his sake. I just wish… I just wish it wasn't this long. It will be another upheaval for him now."
Jack nodded, knowing that she was right. But what other option had there been, in the end?
"I'll let you get dinner now," Dot said; she still worried about overstepping her place, and seemed to think her confession was beyond the bounds of their relationship. She turned to the boy still in Jack's arms and smiled warmly. "Goodbye, Anthony! I will see you tomorrow."
And with that she clucked rather like a mother hen, gathering her two and heading down the path towards the street. Jack shook his head again and carried Ant indoors. He exchanged a few words with Mr. Butler before heading to the hall, taking his hat from Anthony and placing it on a peg.
"Shall we go find Miss Fisher now?" he asked, and Anthony nodded.
"Mims! Mims?" Ant called out, moving into the parlour before stopping short. "Where Mims? Where?"
Jane was on the chaise reading a novel, and looked up.
"Miss Phryne's not here," she said curtly. "She was supposed to take me shopping, but she's off tracking down a lead on Anthony's case."
She tried to hide the bitterness in her tone, but Jack was too experienced at interviews to believe it. Jane had managed to live in the same house as Anthony while rarely interacting with him, a fact that Jack had noticed but dismissed as her burgeoning adulthood leaving her to forge out an identity separate from the family. He wondered if it had been something more and he had overlooked it.
"Jane?" he asked, and she huffed loudly.
"She telephoned and said she'd be home in half an hour, but she was supposed to be home by three. I need new clothes before I start university, and she—" Jane stopped, as if unwillingly to voice that she wanted her foster mother there. "I needed a drive to the shops."
It was a weak cover, but Jack let it lie.
"And she said it was about Ant's case?"
"I presume so," Jane said scathingly, marking her place in her book and looking up at them properly. "He is her current project, after all."
While Jack had never been a teenaged girl, he remembered all too well the feeling when he had left his childhood home to attend the police academy. A sort of stubborn independence mixed with the occasional urge to crawl back home and be told that life was black and white, all the while knowing that it would never be the same even if he did. It was no doubt worse for Jane, who had spent so much of her life without a family to go home to.
"It's not a project."
"That's what Phryne does though, isn't it?" Jane scoffed. "Takes some stray in because she feels sorry for them?"
"Jane…" Jack sighed, realising the crux of the matter. "There are some similarities to how you came under Phryne's care, I will admit. But don't ever doubt that Phryne loves you. And I highly suspect that she would much rather have gone shopping with you then chase down yet another tenuous lead, but sometimes our jobs come first."
Jane blushed, as if giving tentative voice to her worries had been enough to realise how absurd they were.
"I know, Jack. I am sorry for being short with you," she said. "It's just that Miss Phryne is usually so good at keeping her word, and then she's been so busy with the squirrel—"
"Not you too!"
Jane grinned cheekily at him. "Afraid so. He's an utter nuisance. He's also halfway up the bookshelf again…."
—
The house was dark by the time Jack returned home that night; he found Phryne staring at the fireplace, a fire taking the edge off of a surprisingly chilly summer evening.
"I thought you'd be home earlier," she said quietly.
"Long day," he asked, pouring himself a drinking and coming to sit in the armchair opposite her. "Did you speak with Jane?"
She nodded, still watching the flames.
"It went well?" Jack prompted, and when she looked at him he realised her eyes were wet with tears.
"She thinks… she thinks I was done with her," she confessed. "Ready to push her out the door and find another charity case. How did I…"
The rest of her thought was left hanging in the air between them. How did I go so wrong? How did I give her the impression that she was anything less than family?
"She's had people finish with her her entire life, by choice or circumstance," Jack said. "Those scars don't go away with a tour of the continent and good schools, or even love."
She gave him a rueful smile, taking a sip of her drink to compose herself.
"I forget, sometimes, that she hasn't always been here. Isn't that silly?"
"She's been a part of your family for nearly as long as you've been in Melbourne," Jack pointed out.
"Our family," Phryne corrected automatically, but her heart was not in it.
"Yours, at the time. Ours now," he clarified with a small smile. "The point remains, she's… Phryne, she's your daughter. She's brave and fierce and utterly independent, but sometimes she forgets that she doesn't need to go it alone. And, god help me, I wouldn't love either of you half as much if you were anything else."
"But?"
"No but. She needs you, and what that looks like is changing right now. So take her shopping tomorrow, even if it means leaving Anthony's case an extra day, and just be there."
"How did you get so…?" she waved her hand in the air, and for the first time he realised that she must have been drinking all evening. "With Jane, and with Squirrel. You just… you know how to do this. And I don't. I just sort of muddle through."
"Right," Jack said, standing and taking her drink. He placed the cup on the mantelpiece and turned back to her. "You are far too melancholy for this conversation right now, love."
"That's not an answer, Jack," she replied, her eyes narrowing in suspicion.
"I don't," he said simply. "I have the advantage of thinking before I act, but that's it. There's no magic word, no secret spell that gives you the answers. Someone wise once told me that they weren't equipped, they were just the only one there to deal with it."
"That person was an idiot," Phryne said curtly.
"Sometimes," Jack said dryly.
"You're not supposed to agree."
There were times he could not follow her leaps of logic, and did not want to try.
"You know what, Phryne?" he snapped. "I love you. But it is late and I am tired and I had to tell a woman that her son died alone and anonymous and dumped in an alley because whatever opium den is responsible for his state didn't want to be held responsible. And I will no doubt be up at some point tonight because there is a lost little boy in your house for reasons I still cannot fathom."
"Our house," she said quietly.
"Your house," Jack countered. "Because you sure as hell didn't think to confer with me about this."
"Yes, well, I didn't see you objecting when it was cute little lullabies and me being a model of domestic bliss."
Jack barked a laugh. "Have you taken complete leave of your senses, or just partial?"
"I could ask you the same question, Jack. Because you were looking pretty comfortable playing happy families."
"Is this what it is? You think I'm so bloody fickle that… what? I'll—you know what, it doesn't even matter. I cannot believe that you would think that little of me."
"I don't think little of you," she said, so quiet and hurt he felt the anger drain from him. "You could have had this. You would have been good at it. And instead you are here, and I have to watch you discover a secret insecurity in my ward—one I wasn't even aware existed—and smile at Squirrel, who seems to think you hung the moon, and just be so damned good at it. And I'm never going to be that person who gives it to you, and you don't even blink. You just accept it and move on and it's not fair. You're supposed to have everything—"
What the hell was she going on about?
"Why? What possible good could everything be? Especially if it made you miserable?"
"Because you're supposed to," she said, pouting slightly.
"That might be the most ridiculous argument I've heard in a long time."
She crossed her arms defiantly.
"Phryne…" he warned, feeling the beginnings of a headache. "I love you. As we have already discussed ad nauseam, I knew your opinions on parenthood. I went into this relationship with the understanding that Jane would be the only child, and that she was too old to see me as a father. If I in any way regretted it, I am an adult who is capable of raising the discussion. I do not need you to pander to some long-forgotten dream."
"Is it really so forgotten?" she asked, astute as always.
Jack exhaled, feeling as if he'd been punched.
"It doesn't matter," he said. "You're drunk and I'm tired and I really do not think either one of us wants to have this conversation right now."
"That's a no, then."
"Fine, it's a no. I'm not wailing and beating my chest over it, but Anthony's presence and our recent discussions has… reminded me that an alternative was there, however briefly. And that does not mean that I wish we had taken it, or that I am lamenting the lost opportunity, or that I am… what? Miserable? It's a passing thought, that's it. And you keep coming back at it, as if it will magically change if you poke it enough times, and I don't know what you're looking for."
"I want you to be honest with me."
"You don't believe me when I am," Jack said, resigned. "For whatever reason, you've already made up your mind about this. If you wanted an out—"
The words left his mouth without thought, and before he could apologise she was in front of him, eyes blazing.
"Don't you bloody dare, Jack Robinson," she said. "You don't get to throw that at me."
"I'm not—"
"Yes, you are. We have one little disagreement and you expect me to leave. Well, tough luck to you; I'm here and I have no intention of leaving, even if you are the single most frustrating man I've ever met."
"I'm frustrating?" he repeated incredulously. "I came home to find you wallowing over who knows what and accusing me of—you know, I don't even know what you're accusing me of."
"Competence," she said scathingly. "I don't know what I was thinking."
"Clearly," replied Jack. "Because if you did, we wouldn't be having this conversation in the first place."
"Well, fuck you too," she said, turning on her heel and storming from the room. He watched her leave, uncertain what had just transpired.
—
Phryne thudded up the stairs, too furious to even think straight; choice epithets for Jack Robinson pounded through her mind at every step. That idiot. Bastard. Small-minded. Prig. By the time she reached the bedroom she found the anger had…not passed, but changed. It was no longer the all-consuming blaze of indignation, but the slower burn of a deeper pain. Her head was swimming and she could no longer remember what had precipitated the fight—she'd been out of sorts when he'd come in and he'd been tired, but that was not unheard of and it had never exploded so spectacularly before—but she knew that storming off was not the solution.
Sighing, she headed back downstairs; she crossed paths with Jack on the landing. He'd clearly run his hands through his hair while she had been upstairs, a sure sign of his frustrations.
"Phryne—"
She raised her hand to silence him.
"No, Jack. I don't want you to apologise and forget it."
"What do you want?" he asked, and she loved and hated knowing that he would give her whatever she asked if it was in his power. She'd never been quite so good at that sort of selflessness, though it was not always an endearing trait.
"I want to talk this over when we've both had some sleep," she said, reaching for his hand. It was so much larger than hers, but it never seemed to overwhelm. "Come upstairs. Please."
He nodded and followed her, his solid footsteps behind her a reassurance; they undressed themselves before slipping beneath the sheets, their fingers stretching out to lay laced between them.
"Don't… don't expect me to leave, Jack," she said quietly after several minutes of silence, uncertain if he was still awake. "Call me selfish, or frivolous, or whatever you like. I can stand that. But I can't bear the thought of you…"
She could not complete the sentence. He squeezed her hand gently in acknowledgment, and she knew that whatever the morning's argument brought, they would navigate it together.
