“Yeah, well, that’s a minority opinion,” Kit mumbled. Then he lifted his chin, blue eyes defiant, throwing a challenge at pain. “Tessa says my mom loved me, but I never knew her. She didn’t know me. My dad knew me, and he didn’t care. Don’t say he did. I know he didn’t. But he loved my mom, apparently, so it wasn’t that he couldn’t love anyone. It was that he couldn’t love me. And—and the—and—nobody else has, either. I wasn’t enough, to stop—I wasn’t enough. I’ve never been enough, not for anyone, and I’m trying, but I don’t know if I ever will be.”

Jem didn’t know exactly what had happened at the Los Angeles Institute, where he and Tessa had left Kit believing he would be safe. It was clear Kit had been badly hurt, there with Emma and the Blackthorns. Jem believed the Blackthorns all had good and open hearts, but they had suffered great losses while Kit was with them, and sometimes when people were wounded they hurt others. They were all very young, and Kit had not been with them long.

Jem did know enough to see Johnny Rook must have done something truly wrong, if he’d had all Kit’s life to show him that he was loved and never convinced him.

“I loved my parents,” said Jem. “And they loved me.”

Kit blinked. “Um, good for you.”

“I had a happy childhood with them in Shanghai, the kind of childhood you should have had, the kind of childhood everyone should have. Then they were tortured and murdered in front of me, and I was tortured too, and the Shadowhunters told me I would die. I knew I would die. I could feel the poison coursing in my veins. And I remember lying curled in a cabin at the bottom of a boat, on my way to England, feeling utterly small, hollow and hopeless and miserable. I thought I might die that way, that I couldn’t bear the torture of loving and losing someone, not ever again. But then … there was Will, and I loved him, and he loved me. If your father’s heart was too little and wretched to love someone else after losing your mother, then I pity him, but I know it was his fault. None of yours.”

The wind went sighing through the leaves, but it was only a soft sigh. Summer was coming, and winter would not be for a while yet.

Kit laid his sword down and walked over to the tree where Jem was sitting. He came and sat in the grass in front of Jem, as he’d sat at Tessa’s feet while she told him about his mother.