She pulled herself up and rubbed the tears from her cheeks. She still couldn’t say the words “since Will died.” Since that day she sat next to him on the bed and he drifted gently to sleep and never woke again. Jem had been there then, of course, but over the last three years she saw him less and less. They still met at Blackfriars Bridge, but otherwise he stayed away.

I thought it best to keep away from you. I am a Silent Brother, he said, and his voice in her head was quiet. I am no use to you.

“What do you mean?” Tessa asked helplessly. “It is always better for me to be with you.”

Being what I am, how can I comfort you? asked Jem.

“If you cannot,” said Tessa, “there is nobody in this world who can.”

She had known that always. Magnus and Catarina had both tried to speak to her tactfully of immortal lives and other loves, but if she lived until the sun died, there would never be any other for her besides Will and Jem, those two twin souls, the only souls she had ever loved.

I do not know what comfort a creature like me could bring, said Jem. If I could die to bring him back, I would, but he is gone, and with his loss the world seems even more lost to me. I fight for every drop of emotion I have, but at the same time, Tessa, I cannot see you lonely and not wish to be with you. I am not what I was. I did not want to cause you more pain.

“The whole world seems to have gone mad,” she said, tears burning in her eyes. “Will is gone from me, and you are gone from me, or so I have long thought. And yet tonight, I realized—I could still lose you, Jem. I could lose the hope, the slim hope of the possibility that someday …”

The words hung in the air. They were words they never spoke to each other aloud, not before Will died and not after. She had taken the part of her heart that loved Jem wildly, violently, and locked it up in a box: she had loved Will, and Jem had been her best friend, and they had never, ever spoken of what might happen if he were no longer a Silent Brother. If somehow the curse of that cold fate could be lifted. If his silence were gone, and he became human again, able to live and breathe and feel. Then what? What would they do?