Page 80 of The Wallflower Manifesto
She was too distracted by the nest of case notes to reply to that, or at least she was pretending to be. “The ink is all smeared on so many of these,” she tutted. “How do you read it?”
“Quickly, as a rule.” He knocked some of the sheets off the bed to give himself a place to sit. “I try to transcribe them as soon as I get back home. It’s hard to take notes when you’re hiding in hedgerows and prowling the opera, you know. Ink is terribly messy.”
“Abe.” She sighed with a roll of her eyes. “Why not use a bit of charcoal or graphite?”
He paused, narrowing his eyes. Whydidn’the do that? Why hadn’t it ever occurred to him? Was he an idiot?
Yes, he decided. He was an idiot both for her and without her.
Mercifully, she had already moved on to her next observation, so he didn’t have to come up with an answer.
“Oh, and here are your notes on Mr. Aiden. Is he out of jail yet?”
“As of this morning,” Abe replied, a delicate cough covering his amusement. “It took some doing.”
She released a breath, stacking the pages in her hands as neatly as she could manage and turning back to look at him. “What were you doing with all of this?”
“Figuring out how best to destroy it,” he answered with a grimace. “I can’t solve it officially. I can’t write down who did it lest anyone ever find my notes. I can’t bring myself to just draw a black line through an entry in my ledger and sayoh well, Murphy, better luck next time. I don’t know what to do with it. I was pondering destruction by fire.”
“What!”
“Aye, a full viking funeral. There’s a canal out back. We could make a little dinghy.”
Millie rolled her eyes. “Abe.”
He grinned at her, framed in the low afternoon sunlight, holding his chicken scratch and ink-smeared parchment. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
“I know what you’re going to say,” he told her, drawing one ankle up to rest on the opposite knee. “You think we ought to tuck it into a file in case we ever need it again.”
“Obviously!” she exclaimed, exasperated.
“I hate that,” he said simply. “But I’ll do it. For you.”
She made a noise like a scoff, shaking her head. “I dread seeing what your files look like as of right now.”
“If you’re dreading it,” he returned, “that means you’re intending to look anyway.”
And at that he got a little ghost of a smile. “If you’ll allow me,” she demurred.
“Allow you? I insist upon it. If we’re going to run this business together, you’re going to have to be the brains of the thing.”
She stopped moving, her eyes fixed on him as the words he’d said threaded their way through the beautiful maze that was her mind. “Business?” she managed to say. “Together?”
“Of course! You didn’t think you could just be my wife and not my partner in crime, did you?” he replied as though he were offended by the prospect. “Or anti-crime, I suppose, as it were.”
“I’m a woman,” she reminded him.
“Aye, you are.” He sighed wistfully. “I don’t deserve my luck.”
She was turning pink, a pretty little blush as delicate as a carnation winding its way up her throat. “Are you teasing me?” she asked, her voice sounding somewhat strained.
“Yes,” he said immediately, “usually. But not about this.”
He pushed himself off the bed and onto the ground, scrambling through the smaller papers piled there, the ones from his pocket notepad, while she watched him without moving. “Ah!” he said after a few seconds of digging, retrieving what he was looking for.
“Millie Yardley,”he said, turning from his knelt position on the carpet. He shuffled toward her on his knees, and once he was close enough, he reached out to take her hand, which she offered with a bit of a tremble and an uncertain wariness in her eyes. “Would you do me the honor of being my partner?”
And here he presented his prize, a crumpled old sketch, something he’d made after that day in Russell Square, after she’d cracked the first major clue of the jewel-theft case. He pressed it into her hand, a nervous lurch hitting his stomach at the messy and amateur state of it.
