It was true. Will himself had been raised to distrust the Shadowhunters. He knew, better than most, how harshly the Clave treated those who turned their backs on it. He would have been enraged to learn about this lost branch of his family, at the thought of the Clave attempting to execute a mother and child for a father’s sins. Tessa feared for the safety of this lost Herondale, but just as much, she longed to persuade her that some Shadowhunters could be trusted. She wanted to make this young woman understand that they weren’t all hard and unfeeling: that some of them were like Will.

“I get so angry at them sometimes, the Shadowhunters who came before us, the mistakes they made. Think how many lives have been ruined by the choices of an earlier generation.” She was thinking of Tobias Herondale, but also Axel Mortmain, whose parents had been murdered in front of him, and Aloysius Starkweather, who’d paid for that sin with his granddaughter’s life. She was thinking, even, of her own brother, whose mother had refused to claim him as her own. Who might have found his way to being a better man had he been better loved.

It would be unjust to blame the past for choices made in the present. Nor can we justify present choices by invoking the sins of the past. You and I know that, better than most.

Jem, too, had seen his parents murdered in front of him. Jem had endured a life of pain, but he’d never let himself be warped by it—never turned to revenge or vindictiveness. And Tessa had been conceived as a demonic tool, literally. She could have chosen to accept this fate; she could have chosen to flee the Shadow World altogether, return to the mundane life she’d once known and pretend she did not see the darkness. Or she could have claimed that darkness as her own.

She’d chosen a different path. They both had.

We always have a choice, Jem said, and for once, the voice in her mind sounded like him, warm and close. It’s not always the choice we would want, but it’s a choice nonetheless. The past happens to us. But we choose our future. We can only hope that our lost Herondale ultimately chooses to save herself.

“That’s the best hope for any of us, I suppose.”

Jem slid his hand across the railing and rested it atop hers. It was, as she knew it would be, cold. Inhuman.

But it was also Jem: flesh and blood, undeniably alive. And where there was life, there was hope. Maybe not now, not yet, but someday, they could still have their future. She chose to believe it.