Title: Jessa Called Jay
Chapter 7: This Side of Paradise
Author: Elliott Silver
Summary: "Come after me, Jack Robinson," she'd said, but when he tries, she doesn't answer. Three years later, Phryne Fisher returns to Melbourne.
Author's Note: This is for Babsmd, for reminding me to write, and for Elsa007, for not breaking her heart (I hope).
/ - / - / - / - / September 1932 / - / - / - / - /
"You always did work late."
Jack's head lifts in surprise as Phryne speaks, leaning on his office door. It's late, but she knew just where to find him.
Below City Central rolls on like a thoroughfare, but up here it is still and quiet.
Papers and folders drift across his desk, and the air is thick with the smell of ink, and just under it, sweat, coffee, and cologne. Jack's sleeves are rolled up, his collar is loose, his tie discarded. His hair is curling up at the nape of his neck, and he pulls off his reading glasses to look at her properly.
"Surprised I'm not in bed with hot milk and a Zane Grey?"
Phryne flounces into the chair opposite him, her Vionnet dress of amaranth-colored chiffon swishing around the curves of her calves like the tulip petals blown in a Floris-scented wind.
"You always were an exemplary public servant."
Jack watches as she sits, as they take up their respective positions as they always had. It's hard to imagine that she's only been back in Melbourne for four days. On the outside she knows the world has changed (it's why she's here, after all), but sitting here, opposite Jack, it doesn't seem to have changed at all. Here, with Jack, it feels like she's never left.
"Well, I can't claim all the credit," Jack smiles at her, "I was assisted by an exemplary Special Constable."
He pauses for half a second. "Though I do remember I had to rescue her numerous times."
"Rescue me!"
She can't help but blurt it out, and Jack chuckles that deep, rough mirth at her expense.
"From exploding steam rooms, and people throwing knives at you, and weights falling on stages, and being locked up by human traffickers – "
" I – "
" – and from Murdoch Foyle."
Phryne pauses for a moment. What can she say to that? It was why she had come to Melbourne in the first place, how she had first met this particular Detective-Inspector. Afterward, he had been the reason that she stayed (even if she didn't realize it at the time).
"I remember the murder at the Green Mill – " she answers instead.
" – the death at Victoria Docks – " Jack picks up.
" – the carnival and the fabulously fearless Miss Fern – "
" – the performance of Ruddigore – "
" – the feather dance at Madame Lyon's – "
" – searching for pirates' gold in Queenscliff – "
" – the dulcet tones of Mr. Archibald Jones – "
" – Christmas in July – "
" – your aversion to mistletoe – "
" – your tennis game – "
" – your waltz – "
They break off and laugh, giddy and breathless with the remembrance of it all. It feels as if she could reach out and touch the past just as she could reach out now and touch Jack, take him by the hand and pull him into her future.
(Can she?)
"What else do you remember?" Phryne asks him.
Jack considers for a moment.
"I remember you were a beautiful Cleopatra."
She breathes with the memory of it, the white dress, her Roman soldier.
"I remember that you would have been an excellent Antony."
Jack looks down and shuffles the papers on his desk, putting them in meticulous order. He lines up the corners neatly and speaks but his tone has changed. The air in the room shifts as he rises.
"Not exactly the role model for relationships."
He switches off the desk lamp, leaving the room in shadows, and moves towards his coat and hat.
Phryne rises with him.
"I remember when you had a bit too much to drink once," she rushes on. "I remember that I put you to sleep in my bed."
Jack stops.
It doesn't feel like so very long ago when everything between them was on the cusp of possibility.
They had nearly kissed that night on her stairs after arresting his father-in-law – she had praised him for always doing the right thing, the noble thing, but he had come towards her like a storm, brilliant and destructive all at once – and then Aunt P. had walked in.
Phryne had made great plans for it to happen again – except it didn't. Her father had arrived, the cavalcade collapsed, and she had gone into detective mode. She invites Jack over, but leaves him waiting as she sits on a suspect. Of course, that should have been Jack's job, but she had always blurred the lines between their jobs, perhaps even their lives. It's only now, looking back, that she realizes Jack had sacrificed his to be with her, though she couldn't do the same. In her absence, Mr. Butler had served him to the best of his ability, which was not inconsiderable given Phryne's collection of libations. And then there was the nerve tonic…
Phryne moves to him as she remembers that night, savoring what could have been. She still remembers it now: his trim suit was the color of kalamata olives, his voice husky as he tells her he can't be one of her liberal-minded men. She remembers keenly the disappointment of it, the frustration of undressing a man in her bed without being able to ravish him. She remembers Jack's skin was warm against her cool fingers, remembers the slide of the navy pajamas along the curves of his body.
She comes to him now, hands on his shoulders, stopping him in place.
"I had been hoping you would have returned the favor."
Phryne whispers the words against his cheek, so close they must get stuck in the light bristle of his stubble, her breath caught against his skin.
What had she wanted when he opened the door last night? Nothing less than to erase three years of the past in the heat of the present. She had wanted him to take her by the hand and go inside, to strip her bare of everything, even memory, to kiss her until she can breathe nothing but his hope.
"Phryne – " Jack speaks, but she brings her mouth to his now, cutting off whatever else he might have said.
She's only kissed this man twice – or, more correctly, he's only kissed her. Yet when so many other men are eminently forgettable, she remembers Jack's kisses with a clarity that almost scares her. That day in the Café Replique, his hand firm behind her neck, drawing her to into his kiss. That morning on the airfield, strong coffee on his tongue, the brim of his fedora ruffling her hair.
Neither of those times is like now, when she is bending and he is not. Jack is stiff against her, his spine straight and unbending, his body at all the wrong angles to fit with hers.
"Phryne – " he cautions, but she ignores it and presses him backward into the wall. The jolt shocks him and he opens his mouth to hers, their bodies finally aligning, the soft places of hers with the hard lines of his.
"God, Phryne – " he breathes, as if they are one and the same, and then she can't answer him because he is kissing her back, kissing her like she has rarely been kissed before, hands threaded in her hair, pulling her to him.
"Jack …?"
The voice trails off and is gone completely by the time Phryne turns, but she knows who is it before she even moves.
Jay Tayler stands in the shadow of the doorframe.
Her face is pale in the shadows, her skin fading to the silver-green of her neat suit, the color of the underbelly of leaves when the wind blows them upside down.
Phryne had been wearing a similar color dress that night she'd put Jack into her bed, tulle and beads the bright color of chartreuse in fact, dangerous for being so damn delicate.
It all happens so suddenly.
Jay whirls in the shadows and Jack crashes against Phryne, throwing her off balance.
She reaches for him to steady herself, but he is already gone, pushing by her roughly and surging after Jay's retreating form.
For the first time, Phryne notices how much he limps.
/ - / - / - / - /
She thinks he will show up at 221B The Esplanade because he always has before.
Jack has always come back to her (except that one time she asked him to come to her and he didn't).
Tucked up in her black silk robe, she pages through The Virgin and the Gypsy, sipping Courvoisier. But she can't concentrate and keeps thinking about the look of shock on Jay's face, the raw pain of it.
She thinks she should feel badly about it, but she doesn't.
In truth, Phryne can't believe that Jack would be serious about the woman, or any woman for that matter. After all, in the two years that she had known him, he'd barely looked at other women. He'd divorced Rosie and though he claimed to be serious about Concetta Fabrizzi, that had been over practically before it began. He doesn't really have a track record for romance.
Yet the hours tick by, and alone she grows restless, falling asleep on the couch only as the sun rises. When she wakes, it's nearly noon and there's a terrible crick in her neck. She directs the operator to ring City Central, and then his home in Elwood, but Jack answers at neither.
Phryne tosses her head, dresses, and heads for door.
But when she opens it, Dorothy Collins is waiting on the other side.
"Dot!" she exclaims, faltering on the step. "Won't you come in?"
This determined woman is not the quiet girl she remembers. She seems so settled, so firm and rooted to her life here. Phryne supposes that's what motherhood does to you. She can't accept it, but she can admire it in others, at the proper distance.
"Why did you do it?" the younger woman asks without moving.
Phryne waits for her to continue the thought.
"Why did you come back?"
Phryne cannot understand this question until she sees the vivid anger bleed into this woman's eyes. There is a blaze in Dot now and Phryne feels its burn.
"You left us," Dot says and her voice is amazingly calm. "You never wrote, or rang, or even let us know you were alright."
She shifts her weight carefully around her big belly, as if she is trying desperately to keep her balance.
"We all thought you would come back," she continues. "We believed it. Why wouldn't you? This was your life, wasn't it? This was where you belonged, with the people you loved – and who loved you."
Dot breaks off and takes a breath.
"But then Aunt P. died, and Jack got hurt, and still you didn't come back."
Dot isn't crying, but she's close to it, and Phryne has never been good with tears. So she takes Dot inside and says what she should have said all along.
"I came back because I fell in love."
/ - / - / - / - /
Phryne doesn't mean Jack – or rather she does – but she fell in love with someone else too.
To be specific: Geffrey George Clarence Calthorpe Leverton, Duke of Ransley, Earl of Everard-Sanborn, owner of Southwell House in Kent, and sixteenth in line for the British throne.
His baptism had been attended by the newly crowned King George V, his schoolmates the young princes. He is taught to play polo by the Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon; he learns to play cards from Consuelo, the Cuban beauty of cigars and sugar cane, who becomes the Duchess of Manchester. The family name on his father's side was traced back to the Domesday Book, and besides a few parvenu flings in the eighteenth century, the Dukes of Ransley were acknowledged as one of the unfailingly respectable mainstays of the British nobility. That was, until George Leverton, the twentieth Duke of Ransley, impetuously married Vivian van Laren, an aspiring American socialite known as "Vivi." Geff was born three months later and when war broke out in 1914, George immediately volunteered, being among the first British officers mown down in the massacre of Ypres. Without shedding a tear Vivi packed up and shipped out to New York. She took a permanent room at the Waldorf-Astoria, so Geff grew up along Fifth Avenue and Central Park, his summers in Newport and the Berkshires, his new acquaintances the Astors and Vanderbilts.
Little changes except the names (and which hand is supposed to hold the fork when eating).
He is sent back to Britain at the end of the war to attend Eton. Vivi herself returns only in 1923, when American funds are running low, for Geff, now age eighteen and off to Oxford, to formally possess his inherited fortune as the twenty-first Duke of Ransley.
He leaves the university less than a year later when it is revealed he is having an affair with a married woman (who just happens to be the Prime Minister's wife). A string of dalliances had followed, film stars and opera singers, heiresses and socialites, French models and Russian ballerinas. He happily whiles away London Season after Season, from Royal Ascot to Henley Regatta, from the opening of Parliament in February to the Glorious Twelfth in August.
Phryne meets him on a cool morning in February 1930. The Season hasn't formally started, so the only people in town are artists and bankers, both bemoaning their economic situation with renewed vigor as aftershocks of the great Crash continue. She has stayed here with her mother, to fix the mess her father had started, but everything's in disorder now, family, money, world. Phryne worries about it all, from the food on their plates to her mother's health and the family's dwindling finances.
So, leaving a spent lover, Phryne throws caution to the wind and decides to walk home to the Fisher abode in Bloomsbury. Even dirty Southwark seems beautiful in the early morning wind. The sun is just beginning to rise as she crosses Tower Bridge, pausing at the apex to watch the colors rise in the sky.
Below her the river is as slow as time; behind her traffic – horse and car – swirls. Motors and hoofbeats echo on the roadside but it's only when she hears the jingle of bells that she turns.
Her marabou stole blows around her face, her beaded dress the color of rosehips swaying around her legs.
At first she thinks she must be imagining things, because the most handsome man she's ever seen (and she has seen some) is staring back at her, seated on the box of a bright red surrey carriage pulled by four perfectly-groomed zebras.
"Hello," he says and sounds as out of breath as she suddenly is.
Traffic surges around him, horns tootling. But Phryne doesn't notice that, or that the zebras are stomping their hooves impatiently, or that it's begun to rain. She notices only his bluejay eyes, that thick shock of dark hair, the sharp cut of his Savile suit, the gentle play of his fingers on the leather reins.
"May I offer you a ride?"
"Where are you going?" she asks.
"Wherever you want," he answers, but she is already moving, taking his gloved hand and swinging up beside him as the zebras snatch at the bits and squeal as they gallop off through the traffic.
/ - / - / - / - /
What she wants is breakfast, so he takes her to the Savoy, dashing the zebras straight down Fleet Street to the Strand. Hooves rattle on the Court as he pulls up underneath the great art deco sign.
Steam rises off the zebras' backs as he swings down off the box and reaches for her hand, not letting go even when she reaches the ground.
They waltz in windswept and breathless, her marabou dotted with rain, a bright arc of water spinning from the rim of his top hat.
Their heels click over the deserted marble floor of the sumptuous lobby, and despite the early hour, he demands the chef be roused and breakfast served. Remarkably, it is, a sumptuous feast not of toast and tea and bland full English, but practically a private buffet as an endless line of staff offer dish after dish. She hardly knows whether to choose eggs with sautéed chanterelles and Spanish avocado; or perhaps the quiche Lorraine studded with fresh crab and pistachio crust; or maybe, the wafer-thin crepes with whisky-cured Scottish salmon and fresh melon, flown in specially from the Caribbean islands?
There's Turkish coffee, and champagne cocktails, tart with grapefruit juice, orange liqueur, and a dash of rosewater.
"Who are you?" she asks, as they finally rest back in the plush chairs, content and sated.
His eyes are the color of meltwater as he looks at her.
"Geffrey Leverton," he answers. "And you?"
"Phryne Fisher," she replies.
He rises then and offers her his arm, weaving through the corridors to a back entrance where a car is waiting. He brushes aside the waiting staff and holds open the door of a Duesenberg Speedster the same bewitching shade as her dress.
"So, Miss Fisher," he asks, taking the driver's seat and slipping on a pair of soft calfskin motoring gloves as if daring her to surprise him, "Now what?"
Phryne looks across at him and answers. "Now you get out and let me drive."
/ - / - / - / - /
Geffrey Leverton is one of the most eligible bachelors in London. With his dark good looks and charm (to say nothing about his title and money), it's not hard to see why. According the Tatler, he pips even the royal princes to the top spot. He is strictly labeled NSIT ("not safe in taxis"), but waves of debutantes have set their hearts on him, oceans more of their mothers.
Phryne fully expects the infatuation to fade away when the novelty wears off, but it never does. After two weeks, she is surprised. After four, she is amazed. As winter turns into a very soft spring in 1930, Geff courts her with an unwavering and undiminishing devotion that breaks hearts from Dover to Dublin, from Monaco to Moscow.
She forgets about everything but this, this time she spends with him, this way he turns a blind eye to everything but her next word. Geffrey is beautiful and bold, and five years younger than she is. Perhaps that makes all the difference. He has never seen war, has never seen what she has and she doesn't want him to. He sees the world as it is, and reminds her not to see it as it was.
Phryne has never lacked for male attention, never suffered from a lack of passionate declarations of love, or rash actions on her behalf. But it is something new to feel herself so in tune with only one other person, so close to him that suddenly she can't imagine being anywhere else.
She is in love, perhaps, she thinks, for the first time in her life.
/ - / - / - / - /
The Depression continues around the world, but here there are still parties for everything, and for nothing. People glitter, and, like a magpie, Phryne has always been distracted by bright, shiny things.
Suddenly London is vibrant and electric. Every evening there is dancing in ballrooms decked in garlands of water-lilies, followed by swimming in the fountains at midnight. There are card games and charades (both of which she comes out tops), but corridor-creeping is the national sport as lovers criss-cross the hallways of country estates looking for their partners. Invariably Geff comes to her bed, ignoring the morning bell that rings discreetly at six to creep back. She admires his zeal, and he is certainly … zealous.
But he is also solicitous and considerate, and when her mother falls ill again, he sails them to Biarritz on his yacht. At night they make love on the open deck with the sound of the sea in their ears and watch as the stars turn over the sky.
They return to Southwell House, the Leverton family manse in Kent. He has plans to update it, to renovate what was a crumbling Tudor pile into a historic estate. They make love in the maze garden as the sound of hammers rings out, the scent of crushed verbena and geranium heavy on their skin.
Phryne's worries disappear in the encircling warmth of his arms and the swansdown surety of the Leverton name. The family that was rich in title and land is now rich in banking, steel, and shipping – a wealth that makes hers pale in comparison. Geff may not know much about any of them, but he knows people very well, knows how to pick his managers and let them run his businesses. He likes people who know more than he does.
"That's why I like you," he tells her one night in May as she sits brushing her hair at his bureau. Cool air blows in through the tall windows of his Mayfair home, but he lays stark naked like a Greek sculpture on the bed behind her as she watches him in the mirror. "Didn't you know, hen?"
Phryne's head lashes around on her shoulders.
"Hen?"
"Yes," he concludes quite seriously. "I read a Fitzgerald book on the way over – " he means the Atlantic – "and there was something in it about wet hens having great clarity of thought."
Phryne is literally stunned silent.
"And you do, don't you?" Geff says as she comes to him on the bed, black hair flying, robe swirling, a veritable dark hurricane of wrath and indignation. "Also, you were quite dreich when I first saw you, standing there all alone on Tower Bridge."
He rolls his American 'r's to sound like a Scottish burr. Her heart thuds at the rumble in his throat, that sounds he makes when she touches him as she does now.
"I'm not accustomed to being compared to farmyard animals," she manages with some dignity as he slides her robe to the floor, her indignation quite forgotten.
"Yes," he says as he kisses her, "but panther doesn't quite roll off the tongue the same way, now, does it?"
/ - / - / - / - /
So it's not that she forgets about Melbourne, but that it seems so very far away. It only took fifteen days for a panicked daughter to fly her father to London, but it takes far longer for mail to follow course. Her letters are addressed to the Fisher house in Somerset, so even though they were written just after she left Australia, she doesn't see them until she returns there after Ascot in June. By then she's so caught up in the rush of the Season's end and accepting Geffrey's invitation to his Scottish estate, Dubh Éadrom, for the shooting in August, that she hardly has a chance to read them.
The ink is fading on the letters and the Post Office telegrams are yellow and crinkle at her touch. She finds them again at Christmas, but the news seems so old and though she means to reply, she never does.
/ - / - / - / - /
So time slides away, and Phryne relaxes into her life, this life. The rest of the world fades away and if it were to crash, she would be the last to know.
/ - / - / - / - / September 1932 / - / - / - / - /
"For the love of God, Mac," Phryne pounds on the door, "let me in!"
Phryne's knuckles sting with knocking at the door. After her dismal encounter with Dot and her frustrating inability to locate Jack (her detective skills have grown rusty with disuse), Phryne tries her next best option. She needs someone to talk to but when the doctor finally answers the door, she tries to close it again.
Phryne has long since learned this trick and pushes her way in.
She sees only too late the reason for Mac's resistance.
Jay Tayler rises slowly from the sofa, where she is sitting next to Dottie Collins. All eyes turn to her and unusually she feels the bonds between these three women. They surround the reporter, sheltering her.
For the first time, Phryne feels herself an outsider.
Garnets, her birthstone, sparkle around her neck, and her Boulanger dress of thick velvet, so perfect for Jack, the pelt of it just longing to be touched, seems so inappropriate now: too short, too hot, too heavy.
The color is lush as pomegranates, the fruit of temptation that led to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.
She is as dark as the others are light; Mac with her red hair twisted up, wearing Turkish trousers the bright aquamarine color of her eyes; Dottie pink as Meissen porcelain in a dress the color of mint leaves.
And then there's Jay, the brightest of them all, shimmering palomino in an ivory pantsuit, a silk blouse that bright color of buttercups, an unpolished opal at her throat.
That's the difference between a sparkle and shimmer, Phryne realizes. One casts sharp edges, the other soft.
Jay reaches over and helps Dottie to her feet, and the younger woman slips out and past her without a word.
Now it's the two of them, she and Jay, facing off.
"Tea?" Mac offers, nervously. "Coffee?"
There is no answer.
"Yes, I think so," she concludes and disappears into the kitchen.
The two women stand there, without speaking. There are dark circles under the blonde's eyes, tight lines fractured around her mouth, and Phryne knows (without knowing how) that Jack never caught up with her last night. Concetta had taken her defeat gracefully, Rosie spitefully, but Phryne sees now it will be different with Jay.
If they'd been men and a hundred years ago, there would have been pistols and rapiers, fisticuffs at dawn, and Phryne doesn't trust herself against this woman.
Perhaps it's best they aren't men, she thinks.
"Why did you come back?" Jay asks at last, breaking the silence. "Was it for this? For him?"
Phryne doesn't know how to answer, because it would be simplest to say yes, but that wouldn't be quite true. Somehow she feels that this woman already knows why she's here, and it makes her feel guilty. Not for kissing Jack, but for not telling him the truth. She will never feel guilty for kissing Jack Robinson (though she might feel quite badly about not kissing him sooner, before she left, years ago).
"Yes."
"Would Geffrey Leverton agree?"
And there it is. It doesn't take a lady detective to figure out her secrets, just a news reporter.
"He asked me to marry him," Phryne finds herself saying.
"I know," Jay answers her. "You said yes, according to the papers."
"I did."
"Then why are you here?"
Phryne is so very tired of that damned question.
"Don't you understand?" Phryne yells, voice finally breaking with the strain.
"No!" Jay explodes right back, flaring into such an angry, incandescent Amazon that Phryne nearly has to step back. "No, I don't understand! You had three years to come back to him, and you didn't!"
For a moment anger vibrates around the room and then slowly simmers down.
Phryne takes a breath and answers slowly.
"I came back because I couldn't marry one man if I was in love with another."
/ - / - / - / - /
It began at the Savoy Ball.
As all of London gathered for one last grand affair before the August holidays of 1932, she and Geff had won the coveted prize for best costume, he as Eros, and she as Psyche.
Amidst the applause, he had dropped to one knee and held out his hand to her, the Leverton diamond glittering in the light.
Around them all of London went silent.
"Be my Psyche," he asks her in the expectant hush. "Be my soul."
(Somewhere someone swoons and faints. It isn't her. Phryne isn't fit for swooning.)
But in the light he is so earnest, so young and beautiful, that she can say nothing, but: "Yes."
And so the woman who pledged that she would never marry suddenly became engaged.
Immediately there are appointments for dresses and jewels, decisions for invitations and locations. Must the old Earl of Abermarle be invited, can Viscount Bromley return from India? Should the Archbishop of Canterbury perform the service, will vows will be at Westminster or St. Paul's? Shall they celebrate at the Savoy or Southwell House, must oysters be on the menu, which champagne would she prefer?
It's startling the level of detail, and the minutiae of British protocol baffles even the most hardened courtier. Geff tells her to do as she pleases ('tell them all to go to hell?' she inquires sweetly; 'perhaps not that,' he replies), which is no help whatsoever.
Phryne despairs of all of it, and thinks she must scream. She does, in empty rooms, but no one hears.
Is this what she has wanted? Thinking of Geff, she wonders how can it not be? Thinking of everything else, she wonders how it can.
It can't be
It isn't.
He is asking her to be someone she isn't, that she has never been. She has never been Psyche; from the very beginning she has always been Phryne, not a goddess but a courtesan.
She is dressing for yet-another dinner when it happens, rooting around in the ruckus of her jewelry box and desperately trying to find her other red jade earring. In haste she tips the box so jewels old and new cascade across the Aubusson carpet.
All around her the world glitters in facets like magic.
But as she bends down, it is not the earring that catches her eye. Rather it is a swallow pin, battered but still beautiful, the tiny bird's wings gleaming in blue enamel.
It was the first thing she'd ever stolen, if you didn't count male hearts.
She has no idea how her grandmother acquired the little bird, but such tokens were often given by sailors to their sweethearts before sailing away on their journeys, a jeweled promise to return home just as the swallows always flew back to where they belonged.
Jack had found it and given it back to her.
Always and irrevocably he had given her the freedom she claimed she wanted – except only now she knows it isn't.
It wasn't.
It can't be.
Phryne holds the bird to her chest. She can feel the beat of tiny wings in her heart, urging her to fly.
/ - / - / - / - /
"But you could have had Jack at any point back then," Jay says, bringing Phryne back to the present. "Why didn't you?"
God, she could say so much. How is it that it took her, a detective, three years to realize she was in love with another man, and that she always had been?
"I didn't know I wanted him," Phryne answers her honestly.
"And now?"
"Now I do."
Jay nods her head; it is a subtle and elegant gesture, graceful in its barrenness.
"Does he want you?" the blonde asks.
"I don't know," Phryne answers truthfully. "He did once."
"Then find out."
The reporter moves for her things. There are no tears, no tantrums. It is as if she has known this was coming, as if it is almost a relief that it has. After all, this woman has been living with her ghost for years, the one in Jack's memory.
The problem with ghosts is that they are not human, that they are always and heart-breakingly perfect.
The blonde pauses by the door and turns to her.
"He loved you, and he almost died for you," Jay tells her. "Now see if he wants to live for you."
/ - / - / - / - /
Mac comes back in with the coffee, and sets it down on the table. She looks for Jay and then reclines into the chair, propping her feet on the table and lighting the odd cigarette.
Phryne sits down across from her.
"So you finally met a man you couldn't walk away from," the doctor says, summing things up in that distinct and clinical way of hers, "and you ran away instead."
She breathes out a plume of smoke like a dragon.
"Is he worth it?"
Phryne turns to her.
"Which one?"
/ - / - / - / - /
.