Then Jem was there, steady, his arms on her shoulders, his gaze firm and kind, his love a tether to keep her from floating away. Jem, always, bringing her home to herself.

“Tessa, you were screaming.”

She breathed. She focused. She was Rosemary and she was Tessa, she was the Change itself, the possibility of transformation, the inevitability of flux, and then, mercifully, she was clear.

“I’m okay. It’s okay.” Even now, after more than a century of Changing, it was strange to hear herself speak with another woman’s voice, to look down and see another woman’s body as her own.

“Do you know where he is? The boy?”

My boy. Tessa could hear the wonder in Rosemary’s voice, could feel the other woman’s ongoing surprise that it was possible to love like this. They won’t have him. I won’t allow it.

There was fear, but mostly rage, and Tessa realized that “they” were not the fey. “They” were the Shadowhunters. This was one secret she would keep for herself. Jem didn’t need to know that Rosemary had died as she’d lived: convinced they were the enemy.

“Let me go deeper,” Tessa said. “She’s spent years burying what she knows about him, but it’s there. I can feel it.”

Rosemary’s being was in battle with itself. She’d been entirely consumed with her son, with the fierce need to protect him, but had also spent these years trying with all her might to forget him, to force all thought of him from her consciousness, for his own safety. “She knew the greatest danger in his life was her,” Tessa said, horrified by the sacrifice this woman had made. “She knew the only way to keep him alive was to let him go.”

Tessa let herself sink into the memory—she let go of Tessa and gave herself wholly over to Rosemary. Focused on the boy, on the strongest memories of him and what had become of him, and let them possess her.

She remembered.

“I don’t understand,” her husband is saying, but the desperation in his eyes, the grip of his hands on hers as if he knows what will happen when he lets go? That says different. That says he does understand, that this has to be the end, that their son’s safety is more important than anything. More important, even, than the two of them, which Rosemary used to think was everything.

Things were different, before she was a mother.

Christopher is three. He looks like and unlike his mother, like and unlike his father. He is their love come to life, their two hearts intertwined and given shape and breath and cherubic cheeks and golden hair and a nose to kiss and a forehead to stroke and a perfect, perfect body that has never known pain or horror and never should. Must never.

“It’s about him now. That’s all that matters.”

“But we’re already so careful….”