She tells him she is a Shadowhunter, by line if not by choice. She is fey, by spirit and blood if not by choice. She tells him she is hunted, she is dangerous to all those who love her, she is leaving forever. She tells him this is good-bye.

He doesn’t understand. He wants to come with her. She tries again. Tells him the Unseelie Court wants her dead, has sent an ancient group of faerie assassins with godlike powers to murder her. To let him stay with her would mean signing his death warrant. She tells him staying with her would mean giving up his identity, his city, his whole life. He says, You’re supposed to be smart, but you don’t get it. You are my life. You are my identity. I will not give you up. As for everything else? He shrugs. Who needs it?

She laughs. She shakes with laughter. Cannot believe she’s laughing. Then feels the wet on her cheek, feels him press her face to his chest, wrap his arms around her, realizes: she’s not laughing, she’s weeping. He promises he will always protect her. She says—out loud, for the first time in her life—I am a Herondale. I’ll protect you. He says it’s a deal.

It doesn’t feel like living on the run. It feels like stones skipping across a lake. They dip into a life, wherever they feel like it—Berlin, Tokyo, Rio, Reykjavik—they establish identities, connections to Downworld, and when Jack burns one too many bridges or Rosemary sniffs out a faerie or, that one time in Paris, they discover a Shadowhunter on their trail, they slough off their identities, change their names and faces, resurface elsewhere. They consider, sometimes, going underground, living as mundanes, but this was her parents’ choice, and it proved a fatal one. They will be smarter, safer, and when they build new identities for themselves, they build a network of contacts to call on if the need comes. Contacts, but never allies, never friends, never anyone who would ask too many questions when they appear or disappear. No obligations, no ties, no roots. They need only each other—and then they have Christopher, and everything changes.

She insists on having the baby in secret. No one can know there’s another link in this cursed chain. Even when she was pregnant, she realizes later, she understood at some level what she would have to do.

Once she has Christopher, she finally understands her parents, their lives consumed by fear. Not for themselves but for her. She refuses to impose that on her son. She wants a better life for him, something more than barbed wire and security alarms. She wants him to have a home. She wants him to know trust, to know love. She wants to save him from hiding.