It felt wrong to be in Los Angeles without checking in on Emma Carstairs. But Jem reminded himself that involving her in this could bring danger to her door, and the girl had faced enough. She reminded him of himself sometimes—both of them orphans, both of them taken in by an Institute, adopted into someone else’s family but harboring, always, the secret pain of losing their own. They had both found salvation in a parabatai, and Jem could only hope that Emma had found in Julian what he’d always found in Will: not just a partner but a refuge. A home. No one, not even a parabatai, could replace what had been lost. Even now, there was a hole in Jem’s heart, a raw wound where his parents had been ripped away. This was a limb that could not be replaced, only compensated for. As it had been when he lost Will. As it would be if he ever lost Tessa.

Loss was an inevitability of love, pain the inescapable price of joy. Everyone had to learn this someday—maybe this was what it meant to grow up. He wished, for Emma, that her childhood could have lasted just a little longer. And he wished that he could have been there for her when it ended. But this was always the cold calculus when it came to Emma Carstairs: balancing his desire to be part of her life with the consequences. When he was a Silent Brother, he would have been taunting her with something she couldn’t have—her only remaining family, who could, nevertheless, not be her family. Now, as Jem Carstairs, he would have happily taken her into his care, but he was no longer a Shadowhunter—and choosing him would mean Emma would have to give up her entire world. The Law was hard—it was also, so often, lonely.

He kept telling himself: soon. Soon, when he and Tessa had gotten their bearings again. Soon, when he had helped Tessa find the lost Herondale, that piece of Will lost to Will’s world. Soon, when the danger had passed.

He worried, sometimes, that these were all flimsy excuses. He’d been alive, one way or another, for over a hundred and fifty years. He should know by now that danger never passed. It only paused, and then only if you were lucky.

“You sure this is the place?” Jem asked Tessa. She’d Changed into Rosemary again, and he could barely look at her. Sometimes Jem missed the cool distance the Silent Brotherhood had forced on him, the way no emotion, however powerful, could penetrate his stony heart. Life was easier without feeling. It wasn’t life, he knew. But it was easier.

“Unfortunately, this is definitely the place.”