I’m so sorry, Tessa. I had her, and I let her go.

Even after all these years, she wasn’t used to it, this cold version of Jem’s voice speaking inside her mind, at once so intimate and so far away. His hand rested on the railing bare inches from hers. She could have touched him. He wouldn’t pull away, not from her. But his skin would be so cold, so dry, like stone.

Everything about him like stone.

“You found her—that’s what we set out to do, right? This was never about bringing the lost Herondale back to the Shadowhunter world or choosing a path for her.”

There was comfort in the familiar weight of the jade pendant around her neck, warm against her chest. She still wore it, every day, as she had since the day Jem gave it to her, more than a century before. He didn’t know.

What you say is true, but still … it does not seem right for a Herondale to be in danger while we do nothing. I fear I failed you, Tessa. That I have failed him.

Between her and Jem, there was only ever one him.

“We found her, for Will. And you know Will would want her to choose for herself. Just like he did.”

If he had still been wholly Jem, she would have put her arms around him. She would have let him feel, in her embrace, her breath, her heartbeat, how impossible it was for him to fail either her or Will.

But he was both Jem and not Jem. Both himself and unfathomably other, and she could only stand beside him, assure him with useless words that he had done enough.

He’d warned her once what would happen, as he became less himself, more Silent Brother—promised her that the transformation would never be complete. When I no longer see the world with my human eyes, I will still be in some part the Jem you knew, he had said. I will see you with the eyes of my heart.

When she looked at him now, his sealed eyes and lips, his cold face, when she breathed in his inhuman smell, like paper, like stone, like nothing that had ever lived or loved, she tried to remember this. She tried to believe that some part of him was still in there, seeing her, and longing to be seen.