Elliot halted, his anger thwarted in progress. "What are you doing here?"

Romana interposed herself between Jordie and Elliot. "Protecting my best friend." She looked back at Jordie. "I heard shouting. Shall I summon the constabulary?"

"There's no need for that." Elliot crossed his thick arms and tapped the toe of his Oxford on the parquet floor. Romana considered this.

"The way you're looming, I'm not so certain."

He huffed, indignant. "I'd never strike a woman."

"How reassuring. Get away from her."

Elliot took a couple of steps backwards from both women. "What'll Edgar say when he hears about this?"

"I wouldn't worry about Edgar. The embarrassment would surely drive him to call you a liar, after he'd drunk himself sick. I'll save you the shame and exile from your band of chums. I left him because he found himself a lovely young nurse willing to fawn over his every word. Then I took him for every dime he had." Romana smiled. There were tiger sharks less frightening. "Not the story he told you, I presume. I thought not. He saved face, I got everything else. I may not have my reputation any longer, but I have everything that counts. Save. Your. Breath." She poked him in the chest with each final word till he had retreated well out of reach.

Elliot worked his jaw, looking back and forth between the two women.

When his shoulders slumped, Jordie knew he'd come to the same inevitable conclusion they had.

Their endgame was set.

"This is my mother's house, you can't have it." She had left it to Elliot when she retired to the country and they had called it home.

"You can stay with me," Romana interjected, swiftly. "There's plenty of room, for you and the little ones."

"I won't let you take the children," he objected.

Romana narrowed her eyes to slits. "When do you see them, Mr. Duff? Between your many, many surgeries and shifts on the ward? Who cares for them when you're away? The kind and maternal Mrs. Bosley?" Elliot didn't offer a rebuttal to the slight. "A lovely woman, I'm sure, but she isn't their mother."

"She left, you know. Them, me. She'll leave you. The next war will come along, the next disaster that needs a hero, and she'll be off. You aren't special. She only lets you think you are."

Romana elided this slip of Elliot's emotional mask. Her sudden reserve was daunting. Elliot was wrong. Romana had to know he was wrong.

"Let her take them for now. Stopping her, going to the courts would mean admitting the truth. Do you want to admit the truth, Elliot? In front of everyone?"

He worked his jaw. "I won't be blackmailed. This is unacceptable."

"The children couldn't have a finer mother and they will never be safer than in her care. You know that as well as I do."

Jordie resumed her place in the conversation. This was her fight and one she should be arguing herself, however she might like to take the rearguard. Jordie was the soldier; fighting was what she was for.

"Elliot, enough. I won't keep you from them. You can see them whenever you like. We won't be far."

"You were gone for years," he countered, his mien frustrated in mounting defeat. There was love there, too, she supposed. Twisted by resentment and distance, it hadn't stood a chance. Caught in a web of obligation that never should have existed, it had withered to this.

"All the more reason for me to be with them now. They need both of us. Have your anger, I accept that, but don't punish the children for it."

"If I sniff even a hint of unnatural behavior—"

"You won't." Now wasn't the time to delve into Elliot's persistent prejudice. Jordie simply wanted to keep her children in her arms for as long as she was allowed. Preferably forever.

"Fine!" He huffed, relenting. "I'll allow it."

"Thank you."

"That's the last concession you can expect. You hear me? As far as I'm concerned, this marriage is over. Don't come here again."

Jordie swallowed. Her insiders were in tumult. She signaled for the children to return to her. "I'll speak to our solicitor."

"I'll see to that."

"Wouldn't it be less damaging coming from me?"

"For whom, Jordana? The damage is done." Elliot was tired, Jordie could see that. "Just...go, Jordie. That's what you wanted to do all along. I won't stop you." Elliot made for the drinks trolley and the decanted a neat bourbon into a glass.

She wanted to apologize, but she couldn't say she was sorry for any of the things that mattered.

"You'll be nothing without me," he remarked as a parting shot. "You know that, don't you?"

"I'll be happy, Elliot. For the first time, I'll be truly happy."

"Let's go," Romana instructed, cutting into Jordie's self-recrimination before they found voice. She herded the children toward the door and away from the vision of Elliot mourning a family that had been real without ever being true. Jordie wondered if Edgar had watched after Romana like this when she sent him away, had he crawled into a bottle to mourn the loss of the best thing that had happened to him, or had he thought he got off easy? Elliot hadn't got off easier than he deserved. Jordie hadn't.

She drifted after Romana, tearing her eyes from the sliding doors of the sitting room Elliot had shut himself into. It wasn't her sitting room anymore. This wasn't her home now.

"We'll take my car." Romana beckoned Jordie to follow her into the whirling snow. She reached for Jordie's gloved hand when her feet seemed to stick on the final front step. This was the only place she'd called her own since a child, how could she leave? "Come along, my love. There's nothing here for you."

Daniel took her other hand. "Come on, Mummy. Auntie Romana says it's time to go."

Dawn nodded around her thumb, silent and compelling. Her children knew that something had changed. Things had been changing as long as they'd been alive; they didn't fear it.

Despite regular plowing, snowdrifts crowded the roadways and pavements. The lamp posts shined gritty yellow lights onto slushy pavement. Jordie and Romana loaded hastily packed luggage into the boot of the car, the children already clambering in the backseat, chattering madly about snowmen and presents and whether St. Nicholas would know where to find them now they were moving someplace new.

"Don't worry," Daniel assured all the younger children, "St. Nicholas knows just where we'll be 'cause Mummy will tell him."

"I told you they'd be fine," Romana reassured her.

"Then why am I so afraid?"

Romana took a keen eye to their surroundings. It was unlikely anybody was out in this weather, and if they were, they were likely more concerned with getting into the warm than eyeballing two women standing too close for propriety in the morning light. Romana pressed her chilly lips to Jordie's. Jordie leaned into her kiss, cupping a strong, delicate elbow in her hand.

They parted with twin exhales, pluming out into the chilly air.

Romana watched her with her dark, startling eyes. "You're afraid because everything is changing, and you don't know yet where you'll land. Anyone would be afraid." Romana kissed her again. Jordie dared to let herself melt into the contact. Romana nudged the tip of Jordie's nose with her own. "You are the bravest soldier of the many I've known. It's all right if you're scared, I'm scared too. The difference is I have you."

Jordie's lips twitched along with her hands. They ached to peel Romana out of her hat and coat to uncover the deliciously warm skin below. "And I have you."

"You do, for as long as you want me. Now, let's get a shift on before the bits of me you like best start freezing off."

"Heaven forbid. I'd have to stitch it all back on."

Romana chuckled. "You'd leave me better than new."

"You have too much faith in me."

"There's no such thing." Romana produced the keys to the car from the deep pocket of her swing coat. "Care to do the honors?"

Jordie took them gamely. "You do know how to show a girl a good time."

"You have no idea," Romana rumbled with a caress of Jordie's ungloved wrist.

Elliot had long been reluctant to let her do the driving, for fear she'd crash his prized vehicle, as though he'd forgotten she'd operated ambulances on worse terrain in Germany and France than the well-paved roads of Bristol. Don't think of him now. He won't think of me. Even as the thought crossed her mind, she knew it to be a lie.