“You might not remember it, but I do,” she said. “You had me pinned. You could have killed me. You lowered your sword. You were going to let me go. Even after what I did to your family, even with—You would’ve let me go.” She couldn’t bear to look at him anymore. “In that moment, I knew there was no going back. It wasn’t an accident. I didn’t lose control. It was a choice.”

She wanted to say that if she had to do it again, she’d choose differently. But she wasn’t sure it was the truth.

“I just—” She stopped. Didn’t know if she could get the words out. “I just want to say that I’m sorry. For your family … for you … I’m sorry.”

He didn’t say anything for a long moment, just watched her with coal-dark eyes.

“We can’t go back,” he said at last.

“I know.”

“I mean,” he said, kicking his legs out in front of him. “I can’t go back, either. I might’ve chosen differently—with the Guard, with Jude. That day in the crypt in Pallas Athos. If I had, I never even would have been in Medea. But it doesn’t matter. We made the choices we made, and now we’re here.”

She didn’t say anything.

“I know why you did it.”

She looked up at him in surprise. He didn’t sound angry.

“I don’t remember it, but I know why you did it,” he said. “Why you became the Pale Hand, too. As soon as Beru took me to Medea, I understood you in a way I never had before.”

Ephyra kept her gaze trained on him, certain that she didn’t want to hear what he had understood about her. Yet she had to know.

“I walked through the village of the dead,” he said. “I saw what you had to do to bring her back. My parents deaths’ … Marinos’s … all the people you killed as the Pale Hand. Every death just made it more and more impossible to stop. You couldn’t let her go, because if you did, all the sacrifice and pain you caused would’ve been for nothing.”

She didn’t move her gaze from his, even as she felt a warm, wet tear slip down her cheek.

“I used to think the same thing, in my own way,” Hector said roughly. “That because my family had died and I had lived, I had to make it worth it. I had to have a purpose. It was the only way I knew how to mourn them. And I guess I just realized that … even though Beru’s still alive, even though you kept her alive for seven years, you’ve been mourning her the whole time. Ever since she died the first time.”