Please Help Emily

Emily Delmar—equal parts porcelain-doll poise and stick-of-dynamite defiance—slips through the keyhole of propriety one moon-drunk night, trading lace curtains for the staccato jazz of a dimly lit boîte. Keys forgotten, she drifts into the orbit of Richard Trotter, a suitor whose smile promises both rescue and ruin. Their nocturnal odyssey ricochets from his bachelor den—where shadows flirt with Art-deco ashtrays—to the salt-laced corridors of a beachfront hotel, every corridor a proscenium for scandal. Aunt Geraldine, corseted sentinel of reputation, barrels in with Herbert Threadgold, the would-be fiancé whose moustache bristles with entitlement. One glimpse of Emily’s damp chemise and Richard’s unbuttoned collar, and the trio of propriety, desire, and gossip collide like cymbals in a symphony of whispers. The tide, indifferent, keeps breathing against the pilings while reputations calcify in the moonlight.