Ray cracked a small smile. Her nose was quite endearing when red. “Y-you can’t hear!” she sniffled into her handkerchief, her shoulders shuddering with her sobs.
He pulled her tightly into him. “It could have been much worse. For you. For Jasper. For me, even.” He swallowed, his heart turning over at her red cheeks and big, glimmering blue eyes. He could have left her alone. With a baby on the way. The thought seemed to hit him in the gut, followed by the immediate guilt that the severity hadn’t registered until now. He had been too startled by the explosion and could barely remember the long, painful trek from the harbor to the Palmer House. Then Benny sat him in a chair, rendered his diagnosis, and Ray was given a clean, quiet room.
Fussing over Jem took his mind away from the fact that he would always hear in halves. At least he had all of her.
They sat on the edge of the bed. “I want you to go home,” he said, cupping her cheek. “This is so very dangerous. Everything here is wrong and dangerous, Jem. I don’t want you anywhere near it anymore.” He traced the line of her jaw with his finger.
Jem didn’t seem to hear him, staring forward, fingers intertwined in her lap. “I wish it had been me,” she said.
“Heavens no,” Ray said shortly.
“You already need to listen twice as hard as I do. For stories, when you have trouble understanding someone with a heavy accent.”
“I have one very good ear,” he assured her. “And my life. And, as I told you, it will make a wonderful excuse not to hear Merinda drone on.”
Jem tried to laugh, but it came out as a squeaky hiccup. Instead, she defaulted to sobbing more heavily into her handkerchief.
“Jem, I don’t even have the will to reprimand you. Or the energy.” He whistled through his teeth. The room was spinning slightly, and he felt nauseous. He wanted to fall on the bed and close his eyes. He flopped backward, feet still planted on the floor. Jem followed suit.
Ray made out the designed plaster of the ceiling. “I can beg you, though,” he said tiredly. “I can plead with you to stay out of all of this—away from the Coliseum, away from the anarchists.”
Jem turned her head and looked at him. He could feel the brush of her eyes on his profile, even as he kept his eyes upward in order to hear her clearly if she spoke.
“Now when the baby cries, you’ll have an excuse not to get up and tend to it. You’ll say you just didn’t hear it.”
Ray flickered a slight smile. “Exactly.”
“I never want to stop having these wonderful adventures. Seeing Chicago for the first time, watching you and Jasper solve mysteries while Merinda and I do our own sleuthing. Even after the baby comes, I will want to keep my foot in this world.”
“You say that now, Jem. But once you’re a mother… ”
“No.” She cut him off. “That will be a big part of my identity. But I can’t transform just because I have a child. I can’t imagine everything I have loved and enjoyed to that point fading away forever just because I have a new adventure.” She stopped speaking, but he could hear her thinking. “I won’t expect you to give up everything you love, and you can’t expect me to either.”
He grabbed her hand. “But you’re everything I love,” he said.
“No. Not all. And that’s good. That’s right.”
“I am still pleading with you to go home.”
“When all my friends are here?” The down quilt rustled slightly as she shook her head vehemently over the coverlet. “Not a chance. How very lonely that would be!”
“So you’re staying.”
“I am. I am staying close. So very close.”
And Ray smiled, truly—stretched wide across his face—for the first time in days.
* * *
*Merinda was only familiar with this popular treatise on ladies’ fashion and lifestyle due to her years as Jemima’s flatmate.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Perhaps your method of deduction will differ from other great sleuths as they pull back the curtain on their brilliant revelations. Maybe you will think aloud, weaving threads into the tapestry of your solution. The true detective realizes that it is not the means to the solution, but rather its ultimate resolution, that matters most in the study of deduction.
M.C. Wheaton, Guide to the Criminal and Commonplace
While Jem was in the adjoining suite, Merinda had fought the persistent urge to finally flick open Benny’s satchel and go exploring. But with Jem safely tucked in with DeLuca on another floor, no prying eyes would notice if she took a few moments.