“Because she can’t have him?” Alice said bitterly, without looking back at him. “And she has to have everything? I’m surprised she hasn’t come after you. What, you think she hasn’t slept with Josh?”

They left the Maze and climbed the stairs to the rear terrace, lit by the yellow light coming through the French doors and littered with premature autumn leaves. Alice cleaned herself up as best she could with the heels of her hands. She didn’t wear much makeup anyway. Quentin stood by and silently handed her tissues to blow her nose with, adrift in his own thoughts. It never failed to astonish him, then or ever, how much of the world around him was mysterious and hidden from view.

FIFTH YEAR

FIFTH YEAR

Then September came, and it was just Quentin and Alice. The others were gone, in a swirl of falling leaves and a crackle of early frost.

It was a shock to see them go, but along with the shock, mixed in with it like the liquor in a cocktail, was an even greater feeling of relief. Quentin wanted things to be good between them, to be better than good, to be perfect. But perfection is a nervy business, because the moment you spot the tiniest flaw it’s ruined. Perfection was part of Quentin’s mythology of Brakebills, the story he told himself about his life there, a narrative as carefully constructed and reverently maintained as Fillory and Further, and he wanted to be able not just to tell it to himself but to believe it. That had been getting progressively more difficult. Pressure was building up in some subterranean holding tank, and right at the end there things had begun to come apart. Even Quentin, with his almost limitless capacity for ignoring the obvious, had begun to pick up on it. Maybe Alice was right, maybe Janet really did hate her and love Eliot. Maybe it was something else, something so glaringly obvious that Quentin couldn’t stand to look at it directly. One way or another the bonds that held them together were starting to fray, they were losing their magical ability to effortlessly love one another. Now, even though things would never be the same, even though they’d never be together in the same way, at least he could always remember it the way he wanted to. The memories were safe, sealed forever in amber.