It got harder every year. There had been moments, over the decades, when the Jem she remembered truly broke through. Once, during one of the mundane world’s innumerable wars, they had even stolen a kiss—and almost more. Jem had pushed her away before things could go too far. After that, he’d held himself more distant from Tessa, almost as if afraid of what might happen if he let himself near the brink. That embrace, which she thought about almost every day, was more than forty years ago now—and every year, he seemed a little less Jem, a little less human. She feared he was forgetting himself, piece by piece.

She could not lose him. Not him, too.

She would be his memory.

I met a girl here, he said, in love with a Herondale.

She imagined she could hear a faint smile in his voice.

“Did she remind you of anyone?” Tessa teased.

Her love seemed to cause her great pain. I would have liked to help her.

It was one of the things she loved about him, his abiding desire to help anyone in need. This was something the Silent Brotherhood could not strip away.

“I used to come to this bridge all the time, you know, when I lived in Paris. After Will.”

It is very peaceful here. And very beautiful.

She wanted to tell him that wasn’t it. She hadn’t come for the peace or the beauty—she’d come because this bridge reminded her of Blackfriars Bridge, the bridge that belonged to her and Jem. She’d come because standing here, suspended between land and water, her hands tight on the iron railing, her face raised to the sky, reminded her of Jem. The bridge reminded her that there was still someone in the world that she loved. That even if half of her heart was gone forever, the other half was still here. Unreachable, maybe, but here.

She wanted to tell him, but she couldn’t. It wouldn’t be fair. It would be asking something of Jem that he couldn’t deliver, and the world had already asked far too much of him.

“He would have hated it, the idea of a Herondale out there somewhere who thinks she can’t trust the Shadowhunters. Who thinks we’re the villains.”

He might well have understood.