That’s the worst of it. My parents getting banished is bad enough, but at least they’re still alive. I can still call them and email them. After graduation I’ll get to go see them. Griffin’s . . . they’re just gone. They took the blame, and when he tried to explain, they told Olympus he was lying to protect them. For that, for his supposed lies, they got the worst of the punishment. Vanished, off the face of the earth. Because the gods knew that would make Griffin’s suffering all the more excruciating.

Griffin and I didn’t speak for years. Not until he started dating Phoebe and she made us talk through our history. I’d spent ten years blaming him, thinking he’d just let our parents take the fall. That day we lost each other and our parents.

All because of a stupid childhood mistake.

“Nic, I know you feel guilty about what—”

“Guilty?” I gape at him. “Guilty? Because of what I did, my parents got expelled from everything they knew, and Griffin’s got dead. Our parents stepped forward to take responsibility for our actions, and they ended up paying too high a price to keep us safe.”

“What you both did,” Troy argues. “Griffin was part of it, too.”

“Yes, we both fed the ambrosia to Hera’s son,” I spit. “But I was the one who suggested it.”

“You were seven.” Troy puts his hands on my shoulders, trying to make me feel better. “You didn’t know.”

“That doesn’t matter. None of that matters.” I shrug off his hands. “I should have been punished, not them.”

I should have been banished. Or smoted. At least then I wouldn’t have to live every day with this all-consuming guilt. There hasn’t been a feast day or holiday since the decree when I didn’t beg Zeus and Hera and the rest of the clowns to let me take the punishments instead.

As if they would ever listen to a lowly descendant. A half blood, in their eyes.

Every time I see Griffin, every time I miss my mom, every time I get to do whatever rebellious, crazy thing I want to do, I think about the fact that my parents don’t have that kind of freedom. And Griffin’s don’t have any.

“Your parents knew what might happen.” Troy shakes his head sadly, still trying to make me feel better. “But what’s done is done, you can’t go back and—”

“Can’t I?” I hold up the book.

“No,” he says, reaching for the book. “No way.”

I jerk it out of his reach. “Yes.”

“That’s crazy, Nicole.”

Like I don’t know that.