“Don’t make more…” He glared at her. “That’s a little difficult at this point. Besides, didn’t you tell me you loved me? Are you saying I shouldn’t make anything of that?”

She studied him a moment, biting her lip. “That’s not what I said. I said, ‘I think I love you.’ There’s a big difference. Besides, there are other things that…” She left the sentence hanging and sighed. “Let’s walk while we discuss this.”

Side by side, they went on. Pan stared at the ground in front of him, caught up in a whirl of emotions, chief of which was a mounting sense of doubt that only moments ago hadn’t been there.

“When you lose a father and a grandmother, and they are the last of your family, you see things a little differently,” Phryne said finally. Her voice was softer now. “You think about how fragile life is, about how quickly it goes by, how quickly things become lost. You take life for granted most of the time. You live it in the moment and you don’t think a lot about the future because the future seems a long way off. But when people you love die, suddenly the future seems a whole lot closer and very uncertain.”

She glanced at him quickly and looked away again. “But it’s everything, really. The Drouj threatening to invade our home, my stepmother murdering my father so that she could be Queen, being imprisoned and escaping and going down into the tombs of the Gotrins to find my grandmother, being given the Elfstones to use to protect the Elves when I don’t really know how to do that…”

She trailed off, shaking her head.

“It’s not so different with me,” he interjected quickly, trying to find common ground. “Losing Sider, losing Prue and then getting her back only partially whole, being hunted by this demon I didn’t even know existed, and now running away with you. It’s not so different.”

“Then you should understand what I’m feeling. Time is something precious, especially now. We might not have all that much of it. So there is a temptation to do things because you don’t want to lose the chance. You don’t want to let those things slip away and never know what they might have been like.”

“Last night,” he said.

“Last night,” she agreed.

“But that doesn’t mean—”