Jake called one evening and asked, “I’ve got to go back over to Center City to pick up my paycheck cause they didn’t have it ready when I got off work this morning. I thought you might want to get dressed up and go out. We could have dinner over there somewhere.”

The thought was tantalizing. “Sure. I’ll be over in a little while.”

MooneShadows
Chapter II: Bullet with Butterfly Wings

CHAPTER 73
I ended up walking past my car, my mind elsewhere. As Susie would put it, I was on autopilot. I had wondered, I had worried, but even with Andy’s nagging I had managed to put it to the back of my mind. Once again, I thought of Susie’s turn of phrase: I had been in that African river, de Nile.

As the bars of the final song of the night play, my bandmates and I take a step back from the edge of the stage and dip into a long curtsey. The entire crowd- all twenty thousand plus of them- all leap to their feet, screaming their approval of our concert just as they’ve done for every concert we’ve played over the last two and a half years. And just like all those previous concerts, I feel my skin tingling with goosebumps at the reaction of the people who’ve come to see us today.

Wouldn’t you know it, where before I’d found trouble without looking for it, now I couldn’t find any.

Having completed her operation in England, Charlotte and Will return to their island in the South Pacific. There is a rush to familiarise themselves with the progress made in their absence, make new friends and renew old acquaintances.
Whilst Charlotte is doing this, she makes her first of a chain of discoveries, a hoard of laundered currency and packages of uncut heroin!
Then a trip to the scientific laboratories on the south side of Charlotte Island leads to the second discovery; over twelve thousand miles away from where they should be, evidence of an early settlement is discovered with English Celtic Iron Age roundhouses, altar stones and jewellery dating back to a time before the first Roman invasion of Britain!
Shortly after this and whilst on her honeymoon with Will, Charlotte finds a letter written by the settlers who built their original house and two or three days later a hidden casket with more connections to the past!
But there are other discoveries to come. Is there a touch of magic involved? Charlotte becomes suspicious that this might be connected to her meeting in Berkshire with Penelopeia, ancient wife of Odysseus, the Greek hero of Troy and are the water sprite Undine and Goddess Artemis figments of her imagination, the early signs of a mental breakdown or visitors from another dimension?
Perhaps it is a reaction to the events of the past eight months, shipwrecked, marooned, her sexuality confused? Then a battle for her life on the high seas and the biggest shock of all; discovering that all her life she had been intersexed, a male and female sharing the same brain and body and all of this followed by the recent string of astonishing discoveries. Is that too much to ask of a person with XXY chromosomes?