“Of course I do,” Cordelia said. “You’re the only person I know who has a motorcar.”

Alastair stood in the parlor, staring blankly out the window at the house next door. He had been watching two little boys playing on the floor of their living room while their mother worked at her embroidery and their father read the newspaper. He could not help but hear his mother’s words as she’d wept, The child will never know his father.

Lucky child, he’d said to Cordelia, but under the flippancy, there was a hard, cold sorrow, a sorrow that felt like a blade of ice cutting through him. It was hard to breathe around the loss. It had been a long time since he had felt an uncomplicated love for his father, but there was no ease in knowing that. If anything, it made the blade of ice inside him twist harder with every breath, with every thought of the future. Never to see him again. Never to hear his voice, his footstep. Never to see him smile at the baby.

Pulling the curtains shut, Alastair told himself the baby would have everything he could give it. A presence in its life of someone who could not quite be a parent, but who would try to be a better brother than he had been to Cordelia. Someone who would tell the child he or she was loved, and perfect, and need not change for anyone or anything.

There was a knock at the door. Alastair started—it was late, too late for anyone paying their respects to stop by. Not that many people had. Even the older Shadowhunters who knew Elias as the hero who slew Yanluo had forgotten over the past decades; his death was a ghost’s death, the vanishing of someone who had barely been there at all.

Risa had long gone to sleep; Alastair went himself to answer the door. When he flung it open, he found Thomas Lightwood standing on the doorstep.

Alastair couldn’t think of a thing to say. He just stared. Thomas, like all his fool friends, went without a hat: his hair was wet, and the damp ends kissed the angles of his face. His features were surprisingly refined for all that he was so enormous—well, “enormous” wasn’t really the word for it. It didn’t capture Thomas’s compact way of moving. He was tall, but unlike some other tall men, he carried himself with a quiet authority that matched his height. His body was perfectly proportioned too, from what Alastair recalled—it was hard to tell when someone was bundled up in an overcoat.

Thomas cleared his throat. His hazel eyes were steady as he said, “I came to tell you that I’m sorry about your father. I really am.”