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Miles has had a cough off and on for two weeks. It’s not that bad, except that it mostly bothers him at school or when he’s playing. His father finally brings him to the doctor, who prods him with a stethoscope and asks some questions.
“I taste perfume when I’m coughing,” Miles says. “It tastes…like springtime.”
Dr. Appel lets the stethoscope drop. “Sounds like a mild case of hanahaki disease to me,” he says. “Do you know what that is?”
Miles shakes his head. It’s never come up in any of his father’s cases, and he isn’t that interested in science or medicine outside of the law.
“Some people who have romantic feelings they won’t admit to start”—Dr. Appel taps his own chest—“growing flowers in their lungs.”
Miles looks down. Flowers?
“Sometimes it goes away on its own,” Dr. Appel says reassuringly. “But if it gets worse, you might start coughing up actual flower petals.”
Miles’s father says, “And what’s your recommendation in that case?”
“Well, to say something. It can…ah…the alternative treatments are fairly harsh…”
“Dr. Appel,” Miles’s father says. Just his name, but it reminds Miles of when he’s in court. “I’d like to be confident that you’re giving us the information we need for my son’s care.”
Dr. Appel winces. “There are cases where, ah, occasionally, sometimes people won’t… There are some…”
“Sometimes people start suffocating on the flowers,” Miles’s father says. Miles looks up in alarm. His father ruffles his hair, calm and steady. “Coughing up entire flowers, not being able to sleep, eventually getting sicker and sicker—that’s why you recommend saying something.”
“Yes,” Dr. Appel says. “But not to worry, Miles, you’re young. I’ve seen a lot of patients get over it in a few months with not a petal in sight, especially ones your age.”
“That’s good,” Miles says politely. “Thank you.”
His father stops for them to get ice cream on their way home from the appointment. “So there’s someone, huh?” he says. “I haven’t heard you mention anyone special.”
Miles thinks, haltingly, of the warm gratitude in Phoenix Wright’s eyes when they first met properly, and the way Phoenix laughs with his whole body and it feels like Miles has done something tremendously right every time.
“What’s she like?” his father asks.
“Oh,” Miles says. “Um. I’m not…sure who it is. So probably Dr. Appel is right, and it’ll go away on its own soon.”
The back of his mouth tastes like lilacs in spring, cloyingly sweet. He ignores it.
It doesn’t go away on its own.
It gets worse after Mr. von Karma has taken him in. Miles doesn’t know how he can hold grief and rage and lungs full of flowers, some foolish affection for a boy he barely knew and will never see again, but somehow he still can.
One day Mr. von Karma catches him in a coughing fit. “Open your hand, boy.”
Miles slowly, reluctantly uncurls his fingers. He hadn’t been able to wipe the petal off yet. It’s torn and half-crushed, pale and scentless against the palm of his hand.
“Blumenhusten.” Mr. von Karma’s lip curls in disgust. Miles can feel his shoulders trying to narrow away from Mr. von Karma’s disapproval. Blume is flower, he knows, so this must be what they call hanahaki disease in German.
He tries not to think about how his father had reacted instead.
Mr. von Karma is still staring at Miles’s hand as if he’s holding garbage. “Utterly unacceptable. To experience physical illness, possibly even death, from emotions? To draw attention to your weakness with a cough and the trail of rotting flowers you leave behind you?”
Miles has to fight not to cross his arms over his chest.
“There are methods of treatment,” Mr. von Karma says icily. “You cannot become a prosecuting attorney with that condition.”
Miles can still taste the petals, sweet and powdery and soft. He nods warily.
“However!”
Miles straightens.
Mr. von Karma looks down at him, still. “In persistent cases, I’ve heard lobotomy may be necessary. That would ruin you for any career, let alone the one I am taking pains to train you for, at your own request.”
“Yes, sir,” Miles agrees. He locks his knees against trembling.
“It would be undesirable to involve a doctor at all.” Mr. von Karma turns away, looking out the window, a shadow outlined in light. “You will outgrow this…ailment.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Quickly, boy,” Mr. von Karma adds. “I expect too much from you for you to continue to manifest such a weakness.”
Miles nods. The taste of perfume is fading from his mouth already.
Sometimes, he has a night without the nightmare.
Sometimes, he finds a crumpled petal on his pillow when he wakes.
But time goes on, and the flowers wither: from a few petals to one, from fresh and bright to wilted and faded, until even a botanist couldn’t tell what they had once been. And they stop, and Mr. von Karma is pleased that Miles isn’t coughing; they stop, and nothing wakes Miles from his dreams.
Miles would have expected a witness with Ms. April May’s obvious charms to wear a different kind of perfume. Whatever she’s wearing is so thick in the courtroom that he can almost taste it, fresh and sweet in the back of his mouth as he argues with—
Anyway.
It lingers in the still air until he loses his verdict, and his record, and the humiliation finally clears his palate.
Natural, Miles thinks again, pressing his knuckles against his cravat. The fabric compresses against his sternum, but does nothing to diffuse the odd itch in his chest. Of course it was only natural that Wright—that an innocent man was found innocent.
He swallows. There should be water around here somewhere, shouldn’t there?
It was not…natural. It was not the way of things. It had required Miles’s own interference to bring it about, which was itself unnatural.
When he coughs, as discreetly as he can, he feels something solid fly from his throat: not soluble, like phlegm, but pulpy against the bitter back of his tongue. It feels familiar in a way that makes his heart race even more unpleasantly than it had in the courtroom, while he sought—
Carefully, as subtly as he can, he spits the mass into his hand. When he takes his fingers away from his mouth there is a single crumpled petal there: a deep and vivid blue.
He crushes it to paste. It will stain his suit if he wipes his hand off on it; he wants to scrub his hand dry, and then keep scrubbing, until even the memory of that damp petal is gone from his skin.
Instead, he stalks out in search of a serviette, and Wright, in that order. This cannot continue.
“Let me defend you,” Wright insists. His voice is unpolished; it cracks with the strain. He’s clearly never undergone elocution lessons, for all that he makes a living through persuasion.
Miles swallows hard once, twice. He can only hope the cravat hides the motion of his throat, that the flex of his jaw passes for strain and not for a struggle against the blooming itch in his chest. He draws shallow, measured breaths, and shoos Wright away, and makes it trembling back to his cell before he starts to cough.
It’s not a single petal this time, but a handful of them: one at a time over several painful, hacking minutes. Wright had looked hurt, when he left.
Miles leans against the wall, shaking and exhausted. The petals are blue again. Some are round and pansy-spotted, others longer. He doesn’t remember what the one from those months ago looked like; he has no idea what kind of garden grows in his lungs.
He had uprooted it once. He had.
Ms. Maya Fey does not want him to uproot it again.
Oh, Miles can’t blame her for intention; it is not as if she knows. But she insists on visiting with Wright; she insists on blathering on about Wright’s childhood admiration of him, when Wright at least knows to leave well enough alone.
Miles sits in his cell, chest tight and shoulders heaving. He can feel the pressure against the inside of his ribs.
The petals he spits out, wet and brilliant, curl at the ends. He wonders why they’re always blue. It is hardly as if he is in any danger of forgetting who this is for.
January is quiet. It’s warm and drizzly, and sometimes Miles even sleeps through the night. Once and only once he wakes up coughing, his tongue fuzzy and the room dizzyingly sweet with the scent of too-early lilac.
He doesn’t see Wright in court.
He doesn’t miss him.
He doesn’t look for Wright’s brash confidence and irrepressible daring in the defense attorneys he faces. He doesn’t find them unimaginative, unintelligent, dull, and if he did he would be pleased by it. He finds his victories satisfactory, and is confident in them.
Some businessmen and politicians, Miles has heard, keep a decanter of spirits in their bottom drawer. He keeps a bottle of the strongest antitussive he can legally buy without consulting a doctor.
He hadn’t been allowed cough syrup as a child. It helps, but still the petals force their way up his throat, into his mouth; they’re repellently soft against his lips when he spits them out.
“Hey, uh, Mr. Edgeworth?” Gumshoe asks.
Miles hadn’t even heard him come in. “I’m busy,” he says, curling his hand into a protective fist around the petals inside it.
His voice sounds hideous: cracked and raw, thick with phlegm and pain. He’s been coughing for the entire recess. There are four petals wet against the palm of his hand, light blue and diamond-shaped; two of them are stuck together with a bladelike leaf between them.
They are stuck together. Half a blossom, almost.
“I just wanted to say—”
“I’m busy,” Miles snarls. His voice shreds on the second word. “Get out.”
It’s not that he isn’t grateful to Gumshoe, but he can’t do this with an audience, and he goes limp with relief when he hears the door close again.
He shouldn’t be helping Wright. Wright shouldn’t have asked him to help. Wright shouldn’t have taken on the police department and the prosecutor’s office all at once, with nobody but Miles himself to help.
He shouldn’t have looked at Miles like that.
Miles takes the bottle of cough syrup from his pocket and gulps directly from it. It tastes worse than the flowers.
Cough drop. Honey tea. He needs to get ready to go back to court.
The same facts spin around and around in Miles’s head:
He has used falsified evidence.
He has sent at least one person to their death for a crime they hadn’t committed.
He can’t prove that it was only one. Joe Darke had indubitably committed several other murders. Miles, who has no idea who the other victims of forged evidence even were, cannot make the same judgment about them.
Miles is a prosecutor, not a judge. It is his job to make a case for the defendant’s guilt, but not to decide on it.
When he dreams, he is in the defendant’s box again. Not for the murder of Robert Hammond, not even for the murder of Gregory Edgeworth, but for the murders of Darke and a vast and faceless throng.
Guilty, the gavel booms, and Miles wakes up choking, gagging on a foamy mess of petals so thin that he can see the yellow of pollen through them.
In the morning he finds one he missed. The petals have dried white and opaque, joined neatly together at their base.
A skeleton flower. Bitterly apt, in more ways than one, he supposes. It’s a morbid name for a flower that symbolizes honesty, but Wright’s shining integrity has certainly revealed all the ways that Miles himself has failed…everything. Everyone, from the people he prosecuted to the mentor who took him in.
He turns the tiny blossom over between his fingers. His breaths feel shallow. The flower is whole, small as it is, and Miles is dying.
He could tell Wright, and be met with Wright’s contempt: a dishonest lawyer, a mass murderer by proxy, a man who couldn’t meet even an untrained rookie as a professional equal. Wright had respected him once as someone who cared about the truth and the innocent; it would be the height of foolishness, now, to show himself to Wright at his worst and weakest.
Miles flattens his hand over his chest, spreads his fingers as widely as they’ll go. He should be able to feel something, anything, even through his ribs.
He is guilty, after all. It seems he’ll only ever be tried in the court of public opinion, but—maybe this is how it’s meant to be. Maybe he’s dying, not by chance, but as the sentence that would be handed down no other way.
One more verdict for Wright, he thinks, and starts coughing again.
It hurts.
The air here is cleaner than in LA, but it only helps so much. Miles’s throat is raw; he tastes iron and not perfume. He’s so tired, all the time.
A von Karma never admits defeat, Franziska is shouting at him, punctuating the words with snaps of her riding crop. Miles is—he doesn’t remember what he was supposed to have done. She wanted to go somewhere, and he’s sick. He’d promised to drive her. Get up, Miles Edgeworth. I will not wait indefinitely.
She wordlessly pushes a bottle into his hand, under the covers, and stalks out of the room. Miles looks at it and it’s Coldkiller X, it’s bullets from Gregory Edgeworth’s heart and Manfred von Karma’s shoulder, it’s lilac petals.
He jolts awake to the too-familiar feeling of another coughing fit. No flowers this time, just the scraping pain of inflammation, reflex, a feedback loop. He feels like he’s been beaten.
He swallows blood and closes his eyes again.
You shouldn’t cry, Franziska says. She’s glowering down at Miles, pigtails falling over her shoulders like cords, as he shrinks further back into the corner. When had he sat down on the floor? When did he—he isn’t in von Karma’s house, is he? He’d thought—
Franziska stomps her foot. Are you listening to me?
My father died, Miles chokes out. I think I’m allowed to cry. Mr. von Karma has been talking to him about the case again, the trial, how his father’s killer escaped and how a better prosecutor, like Miles should be, could have prevented it. His eyes are sandy with exhaustion; his face and chest hurt. He’s afraid to sleep. It’s so hard not to cry, when he’s so tired, but every time he sleeps—
So he’s dead, von Karma’s daughter says with a little shrug, and Miles wants to hit her. Would he want to see you like this?
He would, and that isn’t right, Miles knows his father wouldn’t, and he doesn’t think Franziska ever—
You want to give him the satisfaction? Franziska demands, shaking him. She’s grown up now, like in the last photo he saw of her, her nails digging into his unprotected shoulder through only his pajama shirt and the light dressing gown he wears over it. Miles Edgeworth, you were not raised to surrender!
She kicks the basin next to his chaise longue over. Blood and bile and flowers spill across the polished wood: bellflowers and forget-me-nots, hyacinth, love-lies-bleeding. Each distinct and clearly shaped, no longer a single curling petal too small to identify.
You FOOL, Franziska shouts, her own voice hoarse with what Miles wants to believe are tears. You can’t be such a foolish coward and cowardly fool to die of this!
I can, Miles tells her, and she hits him across the face.
Barehanded, at least.
He wakes up and the basin is still upright, the flowers dissolving into sludge. She wasn’t here. Of course she wasn’t here.
…The satisfaction?
Miles drags himself slowly, miserably off the chaise. His abdomen feels bruised with the force of his coughing, and he has to stop a few times along the way, but he makes it from the bedroom to the bathroom to the kitchen and puts a kettle on to boil.
Black tea of any kind is a rare indulgence these days; he has no want and little need for the caffeine, usually. He measures a pot’s worth of Earl Grey out now.
He had dreamed, repeatedly, of Franziska. It is…not untrue that there are few if any other people in his life who have been concerned for him—
He gets one deep breath, as before going underwater, before the spasms start again. He coughs until he retches, shuddering through it with his forehead resting against the table and a pair of bloody bellflowers caught in his cupped and dripping hands.
The kettle is shrieking at him. Exhausted, aching, Miles turns the burner off with his elbow and goes to wash his hands and face. The flowers, rinsed clean, crumple in a bright splash of blue against the drain.
Why Franziska?
It’s true that she had brought him medicine once or twice, when von Karma scorned even that much weakness. That she had tried to comfort him with denials. He’d done the same for her.
He pours the water into the teapot and breathes steam and bergamot.
Would he want to see you like this?
It had been the culmination of von Karma’s revenge, hadn’t it? Miles’s own death, to hurt his father even beyond the grave.
An ocean away from California, exhausted, torn up with pain, Miles thinks for the first time, Does my death serve anyone more than my life would?
Mr. Edgeworth, Lana Skye says.
Miles looks plaintively up at her. I called in sick. He had, hadn’t he? He must have.
She leans against his window, haloed by the sun. I’m just stopping by on my way to see Ema. I wanted to thank you for not prosecuting.
I did, Miles says. Or, well, he hadn’t personally—he couldn’t have; he’d been too much under suspicion himself for people to trust his work on a corruption case—but he’d supported it.
No. Lana shakes her head. For murder.
You didn’t kill Goodman or Marshall, Miles protests. Wright proved that.
He knows he’s dreaming, because the cough is mild, harmless, even as bright borage and glass-clear skeleton flowers drip into his hands. There’s no blood, no vomit, no pain.
Joe Darke? Lana asks, and Miles says nothing.
She pushes away from the window and presses the back of his hand, lightly. Her fingers are cool against his fever-dry skin. I forged a lot of evidence, Miles. Thank you for giving me a chance to try to make up for it.
Miles is choking when he wakes up, black spots floating at the edges of his vision. There’s something stuck in his throat, and he’s so tired, his overstrained muscles too weak to force it out. He can manage shallow sips of air around it, but nothing more, and suddenly, desperately, he doesn’t want to die.
He’s been in the US for too long. Can’t even remember the bloody emergency number here, at first. Loses more oxygen in his panic before he manages to dial 112.
A von Karma doesn’t surrender. Miles manages to stay awake until the ambulance comes.
He drifts awake, floating lightly up and up to the rhythmic sound of beeping and the distant bustle of activity. Nothing hurts at all. When he opens his eyes the white of a hospital ceiling looks back at him.
A few minutes later, he thinks, a—doctor?—pokes her head into the room.
“Mr. Edgeworth,” she says in crisp, nearly-accentless English. “How are you feeling?”
“Good,” Miles says. It should be a lie, and it isn’t. He does feel good.
“That would be the codeine,” she says dryly. “The ambulance crew removed an entire stem of a flower from your throat. Are you aware that you are actively dying of your hanahaki disease?”
It’s so nice not to hurt. The tubes all around him are nice, too—there’s more than one IV, and even oxygen. They’re probably giving him nutrients, when he’s barely been able to keep anything down in…he isn’t quite sure. “What kind of flower?” he asks.
She blinks, but looks at her clipboard. “Gladiolus. Does it matter?”
“Mm,” Miles sighs. “That makes sense. It’s just like him, and not enough like me. Honor, you know.” She had clearly not been joking about the codeine. This should probably concern him more than it currently does. “He’s a good man. Never does the easy thing, just the right one. Heh, the Wright one.”
The doctor looks at him blankly.
Miles should really stop talking. He doesn’t allow himself to speak about Wright without complaint, usually. But he doesn’t hurt, and this woman is a stranger he’ll likely never see again, and he hasn’t started coughing yet. Wonderful stuff, medicine. “He doesn’t care what people think about him… It’s mostly been bellflowers lately, though. Did you know I’ve loved him since we were nine years old?”
She glances at her clipboard and makes a note. “And your symptoms?” She actually sounds curious now. “Was it chronic this whole time, or did it develop only recently?”
“It went…” Miles closes his eyes and tries to remember the word. “Latent. A little over thirteen years. I thought it was cured. And then I saw him again and I—I can’t tell you about all this,” he remembers, just in time to keep from telling her enough that she might get curious about his life.
He thinks about going back to sleep, but he feels too well-rested. Instead he opens his eyes again to find her tapping her pen against her clipboard, in time with the soft beeping of the monitors attached to him.
“It is not going to go latent again,” she says when he meets her eyes. “You have no time to wait it out. Your lungs are overgrown, and your body is in revolt. Telling other people how you feel will not help for much longer.”
Other…people?
“Tell this good man of yours, or die. Those are your choices.”
“You’re the first person I’ve told,” Miles says, still stuck on the surprising thing. He knows he’s dying. He no longer wants that to be true.
“In”—she looks at his chart again—“sixteen years?”
Miles tries to shrug, and fails. “There were circumstances. God, I missed him, though. I didn’t realize how much until I saw him again.”
“Mr. Edgeworth…” The doctor shakes her head. “Are those circumstances worth your life?”
“I need to fix some things,” Miles says. He wants—he wants to be someone Wright could admire, at least. He doesn’t want to crawl for pity, to offer his confession as a last resort against death. He wants to make something of it, to bring Wright something worth keeping along with his words. A world they could stand in, side by side, if Wright would agree to stand with him.
“I can write you some prescriptions,” the doctor says cautiously. “I cannot promise they will work for very long.”
It’s unfolding in Miles’s head, grand and sweeping and glorious. The use of the law as justice; a display of his own honest skill, not just tested against Wright’s but triumphant over it. The moment of victory—the moment they’re finally on equal footing again, and Wright’s eyes widen in surprise and—
“Mr. Edgeworth?”
“Did you know his eyes are blue?” Miles asks dreamily. “You’d think they’re gray, they’re so dark, but they’re not, if you get close enough.”
The doctor clears her throat. “Rest. I will be back in a few hours to discuss your care plan and see what you intend.”
Miles plans the reform of the Los Angeles Prosecutor’s Office by night and tells everyone he meets about Phoenix Wright by day.
Maybe not everyone he meets. It feels like it: extravagant, ludicrous, vulnerable, foolish.
He makes a trip to the zoo and informs the porcupines there that they remind him of his beloved’s hair, which is easy. He browses homemade candies at the weekly market and asks how long they’ll last—“I want to bring some home for someone dear to me”—which is harder.
Home, he says: a settled place, comfort, belonging.
Franziska is in California; he addresses a letter to her apartment in Germany, knowing it will be forwarded, hoping the international mails buy him a little more time all the same. I’ve fallen in love, he tells her, a long time ago and despite myself. He could make me happy, and I hope one day that will matter to you more than who he is.
A counselor affiliated with the hospital follows up on the progress of Miles’s hanahaki disease and Miles tells her, “Your hospital saved me the second time, but he saved me the first.”
It does help, absurd as it is, giddy and embarrassed as it makes him feel. There have been no more whole stems, and sometimes he even gets single or twinned petals instead of intact flowers. Spring is unfurling in his lungs, slowly, slow enough that he can breathe around it—flowers that speak of new beginnings, joy, promise.
He can sleep, most nights, with the help of the stronger of his prescriptions. He counts the doses as they go down. No refill, the bottles remind him. Return to doctor for follow-up.
He’ll have to hurry.
“It’d been better for everyone if you never came back from the dead, Edgeworth!” Wright snaps, and Miles feels it like a hard blow to muscles still tender with months of relentless coughing.
He was trying. God, he was trying, one tiny step at a time.
Something quivers in his chest, and he wonders what kind of grief or regret is working its way up from his lungs. He swallows hard and thinks about saying it right now, here, under the harsh lights of the Criminal Affairs Department.
He thinks about what would happen to Maya Fey if he did, and swallows again—against the flowers, against the nausea, against the dying hope.
Miles had wanted to be done with hiding in a public toilet and coughing himself dizzy. He had meant to come back and—and tell Wright that he understood now, that he was going to do something good to make up for what he had done. He had meant to lead up to the declaration of his sentiments slowly, to keep from startling Wright.
His vision blurs. He tells himself the tears are from the coughing, and gags, and finally spits out a marigold bud, the color of dying embers in his hand.
He manages not to vomit from the spasms this time, but it’s a narrow victory, and a grim one. He has to lean against the cold side of the stall for a long moment, disgusting as that is, before he can leave. Wash his hands. Rinse his mouth. Take another of his pills. He only has three more, now.
Once they’ve gotten Maya back, it doesn’t matter if Wright never wants to speak to him again. Until then, Miles needs to help.
He tries. Every argument another brick for an empty house. Every speech for the court’s ears about his answer—his purpose—another hint that keeps the flowers at bay for a few more precious hours.
For a moment, Miles lets himself pretend that Wright had wanted to save him. Just a moment. Not long enough to numb the pain when Wright’s contempt hits him again, but he thinks nothing would.
He has two more pills left, and they’ve made no progress finding Maya.
He says, “Thanks to you, when you sealed off my path to a perfect win record… I began to realize the error of my ways.” I was wrong, he means, when he hasn’t apologized to anyone except von Karma in something like a decade. “I realized that things such as a perfect record were meaningless.”
You did save me, he means, and I wanted what you had. I wanted to share it with you.
Wright looks at him with mirror-bright eyes and says, “I don’t believe you.”
One more day of the trial. Two at most. Then Miles can leave.
The trial ends. Maya is safe. A few more moments, Miles tells himself, watching their joy. A few more moments before he leaves, and buys that time with almost all of his own truth.
I grieved you, Wright all but says back, and the startled breath Miles draws in response goes almost clear down to his diaphragm.
Pearl Fey insists Miles celebrate with them, and Wright doesn’t refuse.
They end up at the Gatewater Hotel. The sky is gold with early dusk outside the windows, and Maya has descended on a buffet table like the proverbial plague of locusts, with Pearl clinging to her arm.
“I didn’t even know they had lobster at buffets,” Wright says awkwardly into the silence.
It’s better than Miles has managed, at least. And he’s out of time. “Wright,” he says, and something in his voice makes Wright take his eyes off the Fey girls and turn to Miles himself. He’s afraid of what it must be, but there’s no use in being afraid now. “Do you agree with me that our work today showed the best of what the trial system could be?”
Wright considers it for an agonizing moment. “Yes,” he says finally. The tightness in Miles’s shoulders, between his ribs, eases. “When I realized today that I trusted you, too… That’s what gave me the strength to keep going, however impossible it seemed. And we brought the truth out in the end.”
“Together.” Miles’s voice is hoarse, but for once not from coughing. “That’s what… That’s what I had hoped.”
“Edgeworth—” Wright cuts himself off. His eyes are wide and soft with shock. He had grieved Miles’s death, deep and hard enough that it turned to rage. He sits here now across from Miles because of Miles.
Miles could say I have hanahaki disease and let Wright press the information from him bit by bit. It would be easier. What’s that?, maybe. Who do you love? When did you get it?
Instead he says, quietly, “I’ve loved you for sixteen years,” and watches Phoenix’s jaw go slack.
“You—I—what?”
“You heard me,” Miles says. It should have been easier the second time saying it out loud; it’s so much harder to say to Phoenix himself than to a doctor he’ll never see again. “I—didn’t know it mattered until today.”
“You didn’t—” Phoenix draws in a furious breath and looks around before he can start shouting. Maya and Pearl are still at the buffet, Maya pointing to something on a fruit platter while Pearl stands on tiptoe. There are no other diners around them. “You didn’t,” Phoenix says again, voice lower but shaking with fury, “know it mattered?”
Miles’s whole body feels as raw as his throat ever has, like he might start bleeding if he breathes wrong. “Could you respond to the first thing I said, please?”
“I…” Phoenix gestures helplessly. “Of course I— You know. You have to know. How didn’t you know before?”
There’s something wounded in the broken sentences, and Miles doesn’t press. He does know, now. “I think we’ve both taken the long way to this particular answer.”
Phoenix breathes out a sharp laugh. “Maybe. Can I—can we talk? Later.”
“Later,” Miles agrees. “Let me give you my number.” He takes out one of his personal cards and reaches across the table to hand it to Phoenix.
Their fingers brush and it’s a shock clear up Miles’s arm, galvanic and bright. He drops the card, or Phoenix does, and Phoenix picks it up with a faint flush starting to dawn across his cheeks. It is, inconveniently, an enthralling sight. “Let me—you put your cell number on your cards?”
“It’s a personal card,” MIles says, baffled. “Not a business one.”
Phoenix mutters something, no doubt rude, too quietly for Miles to hear, but there’s something so fond in his eyes even as he shakes his head that for an instant the affection fills Miles’s lungs as surely as the flowers ever did.
Then it passes, and he breathes, deep and clean.
Phoenix scrawls his number on the back of one of his business cards and nudges it across the table to Miles. “If you don’t actually call me tonight—”
“I will,” Miles says.
Whatever had been fascinating the girls at the buffet finally releases them, and Miles adds a moment of gratitude that he hadn’t had to interrupt himself.
“Mr. Nick!” Pearl is bouncing on her toes. “Do you know when Mr. Scruffy Detective will be here?”
“Hopefully soon,” Phoenix says, and looks at Maya’s half-heaped, half-empty plate. “—Maya, are you even going to have room for dinner?”
“Of course.” Maya grins at him. “This is just to keep my strength up until then!”
Miles sits back in his chair and lets the corners of his own mouth curve up in return. This is…what he’d wanted, the whole time. And tonight—there will be a tonight, and a later, that he can look forward to with confidence and without fear, doing good work in good company.
It’s more than answer enough for him.