Jack hates it. So you want to protect him from having to keep his secret by keeping it for him? You want to keep him from knowing he has a secret? And she says yes, exactly, and then he will grow up unafraid of the world.

Jack says growing up unafraid of the world is a good way to get destroyed by it.

She waits until the baby is old enough to eat solid food, old enough to survive without her, or—more to the point—that she can persuade herself he can survive without her. She doesn’t know if she can survive without him, without either of them, but it’s time.

She sends them away.

She is lying on the floor. She is dying. There are strangers here, but she is alone. She is hiding in the secret place in her mind where she keeps her memories of Jack and Christopher. She thinks, maybe she knew this was inevitable, why else return to L.A., where it would be so easy to find her?

She is so tired of being alone. She is tired of missing her son and her husband, tired of forcing herself not to look for them. At least in L.A., she can feel close to the past, to the family she’s lost. This is the only city that’s ever felt like home, because this was where she found her home in Jack’s arms, and in her weakest moments, this is where she imagined a home for them, Rosemary and Jack and Christopher, a family again, a fairy-tale life in the bungalow. She planted a garden she thought Christopher might like. She filled her days imagining them with her, and now, dying, she imagines them with her still.

Maybe she has won. Maybe Fal will believe the line has died with her, and Christopher can be safe. This is the relief in dying. This, and knowing that if she’s wrong, if she’s failed, she will be saved having to watch him suffer. She will never watch him die because of who his mother is. This is her last thought, as the pain carries her into darkness. She will never have to know a world without Christopher—

And then she is Tessa again, and she is at Will’s side, and Jem is there, and Will is slipping away, and she is trying to fathom how she will face a world without him.

And then Tessa is on a bridge, the Thames beneath her, a miracle beside her. Love reawakened, love returned. Jem, her own true, real, flesh-and-blood James Carstairs, returned to her from silence and stone, and Tessa, whose heart has remained so full through the years and years of empty days, is finally no longer alone.