Re: [Jack & Clem: family reunion]
Jack didn't mind the real awful office. He had made it as much his as it was the newspapers, and he had dug the remnants of his career into the foundations of all the rubbish strewn over the place and deliberately forgotten they were there. But Clementine's storms were colossal events. They involved, he recalled, a lot of doors banging. There were a lot of doors between him and the exit and the headache that radiated from the thick ridge of bone behind his eyebrows to the base of his skull above his neck, disagreed with any idea of doors banging in the vicinity.
So he tried conciliatory. It had been a long time since Jack had tried persuading a woman to do anything with the practiced ease he had once. Mostly, Jack didn't persuade these days, and the women he slept with were paid to look happy about it. He had reached out a hand before she stopped at the door, and declaimed her parting shot, and then she said what it was she said.
Clementine was dramatic, but while a narrow escape from death might be an exaggeration, there was still something that needed to be built upon to make it something at all. Jack's face shaped dismay. "What do you mean, you were in the hospital? Why were you in there? Did he know you were in there when he went?" Three questions in succession and he glossed over her father's death. He'd not liked the man very much, without a solid rationale for doing so.