She launched into a description, painting the scene as if she were writing in her novel. She embroidered on conversations, making them funnier than they had been; she described the taste of everything on offer from the flakiness of the pastries to the fizziness of the punch. She wove a picture of the outrageous polka-dotted cravat Matthew had paired with striped silk trousers and a magenta vest. She remembered that Jesse hadn’t met Filomena, and she told him all about the young Italian girl and her vampiric admirer.

“She’s a very good dancer,” said Lucie. “She taught us a new waltz that she learned in Peru.”

The gates of the Institute rose before them, its spire piercing the clouds overhead. Lucie paused at the gates, turning to Jesse. “Thank you for walking me home. However, I did not hear the apology I was promised. You should not have read my book without asking.”

He leaned against the gatepost. Or at least, he seemed to: Lucie knew that he was insubstantial, and the gatepost solid. “No,” he said. “I shouldn’t have.”

There was something about him, she thought; he was the opposite of Matthew, in his way. Matthew put a bright face on every situation, even if it was dreadful. While Jesse spoke directly, never deflecting.

“And you should not have said I thought of you as a joke, or of your situation that way,” she said. “All I want is to help you. To repair this.”

“To repair death?” he said softly. “Lucie. You were wrong in what you said—but only when you claimed you are not like Princess Lucinda. Not brave or resourceful or clever. You are a thousand times those things. You are better than any imagined heroine. You are my heroine.”

Lucie felt herself blush. “Then why—”

“Did I get so angry? It must have seemed to you that I hated the book,” he said, his voice low and rapid, as if he wished to get to the end of what he had to say before his nerve failed him. “Or hated your writing, or hated that character—Jethro—but it was nothing of the sort. If anything, I was jealous of the bastard. His one purpose is to say exactly what he feels.” He looked up at the sky, the snow. “You have to understand that I always, always assumed that you could never feel anything for me. And that is why I thought that it was safe that I felt the way I did about you.”

Lucie stood motionless. She couldn’t have moved had a charging Shax demon suddenly appeared. “What do you mean?” she whispered. “What do you mean, the way you felt?”