For one year, they have forced themselves to live apart. In one small apartment, seedy blocks from the Vegas strip: her son and her husband—who now calls himself Elvis, but who has been Barton and Gilbert and Preston and Jack and Jonathan, who has changed not just his name but his face, over and over again, all for her. In an even smaller, much lonelier apartment in a sad stretch of desert behind the airport: Rosemary, feeling their absence with every breath. She haunts their shadows, watches Christopher on the playground, at the zoo, in the pool, never letting him see her. Her son will grow up unable to recognize his mother’s face.

She allows herself monthly encounters with her husband—an hour of stolen kisses and all the details of a childhood passing without her—but that was selfish. She sees that now. Bad enough that the Shadowhunters were able to get as close as they did. Now the fey have sniffed her out. She’s set up charms around the apartment, a warning system—she knows their emissaries have been there; her position has been compromised. And she knows what will happen if they find her. If they find him.

“You have to go deeper underground,” she tells her husband. “You have to change your identities again, but this time, I can’t know what they are. If they find me … you can’t let me lead them to you.”

And he is shaking his head, he is saying no, he can’t do this, he can’t raise Christopher alone, he can’t let her go knowing he can never have her back, he can’t risk her facing danger without him, he can’t, he won’t.

“I have the heron,” she reminds him. “I have a way to summon help if I need it.”

“But not my help,” he says. He hates the necklace, he always has, even before it was tainted with the Shadowhunter’s enchantment. He tried to sell it once, without telling her, because he knows her heritage only brings her pain; she forgave him. She always forgives him. “What if you need me?”

She knows he hates it, the idea that she would call on a stranger over him. He doesn’t understand: this is because a stranger’s life means nothing to her. She would let the world burn if it meant keeping Jack and Christopher safe.

“What I need is for you to keep him alive.”

The world believes Jack—for that is how she first loved him and how she always thinks of him—is a crook. Untrustworthy, venal, without capacity for trust or love. Rosemary knows better. Most people are spendthrift with their care, spreading it around without discretion. Jack loves only two things in this world: his wife and his son.

She wishes, sometimes, that he would include himself on that list. She would worry less for him if she thought he allowed any worry for himself.

“Okay, but what if we win?” he says.

“What do you mean?”