Page 117 of Better in Black
“She’s lost so much,” Max said, his voice rough. “It can be a special kind of loneliness, you know, when you’re surrounded by people you love, but none of them can understand your loss.”
Jace let the words sit between them.You’re talking about yourself,he wanted to say.You could share your loss with Maryse, with us. We’d understand better than you think.
But he held back. You could not force someone to want a family, he reminded himself. No matter how much they needed it. People had to want to accept the love that was offered them. They had to believe they deserved it. And Max, he knew, was not quite there yet. “Yes,” Jace said finally. “I imagine it can.”
Clary was still asleep when Jace returned to the guest room. He wrapped the parchment manuscript in a T-shirt, zipped it into his backpack, and eased back into bed without waking her. Hercloseness was always reassuring. But tonight, it also added to his dread. He understood Max’s suffering; he could imagine, all too well, how it would feel to lose Clary. He still dreamed of it, some nights. Her pain, her death. A bleak world, empty of love. He’d come so close to losing her, so many times. It was no wonder he still had nightmares about it. Sometimes, though, he wondered whether his dreams were showing him an averted past, or warning him of an inevitable future.
An inevitable, prophesied future.The end of all Shadowhunters.It was unthinkable. But thinking somethingcouldn’thappen didn’t mean itwouldn’thappen. Life had proved that, over and over again. They all had the scars to prove it.
Murmuring in her sleep, Clary pressed closer to him. Jace curled his body around hers, remembering the look on her face when she’d said,You know it doesn’t really matter what we choose, right? The wedding is years off, if it happens ever.
How sad she’d sounded. The hopelessness in her voice. She would love him if they never got married, he knew. She trusted him. It was the future she didn’t trust.
Jace had heard the same hopelessness in Max’s voice. When he’d spoken of the past, of the Clave. And for years Max had not reached out, because he’d had no hope: no hope that his sister missed him, no hope that he wouldn’t be rejected. He’d kept track of his family from the sidelines, making notes in the margins of his loneliness like a historian who was interested in Lightwoods and Truebloods for purely academic reasons, and not because they held the key to a hidden interior of pain, loneliness, and truth.
It was risky to hope. Hope could be crushed. Hopes could die. But to resign oneself to never hoping was a sort of death too. If only Max had reached out to Maryse earlier, or she to him, how muchpain could have been avoided? If she had been there when he’d lost his wife, how much might his sorrow have been eased?
The questions were unanswerable, but Jace knew one thing: Tomorrow, when he and Clary were alone, he would tell her that they were going to keep planning their wedding as if it were happening any day now. Because weddings were not just a symbol of love, but of hope. And hope might be hard to hang on to when you were alone, but what was the point of gathering your friends and family for a ceremony if not to remind yourself that you werenotalone? That even as you walked through the world with your chosen partner at your side, you were surrounded by all your other chosen people, their hands outstretched to catch you if you fell?
—
In the morning, Max made pancakes. Clary’s had a smiley face made out of chocolate chips. Jace’s saidHI!
“I can’t help myself, it’s a dad thing,” Max said. “You get it.”
Clary smiled, thinking of Julian Blackthorn and his pancakes. Jace focused on pouring a very perfect spiral of syrup. It was a tragedy that Max’s son had lost his mother, Clary thought. But it must be wonderful to have a father like this.
Max seemed so different than he had the day before. Like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. Maybe, she thought, it was just knowing they’d soon be out of his hair.
“You want me to drive you to the SEPTA station?” Max asked.
“It’s okay, we’ll Portal,” Jace said.
Max laughed. “You won’t find a warlock within twenty miles of here. For reasons that escape me, they tend to avoid the suburbs.”
“Clary will do it,” Jace said, and Max looked shocked. Jace and Clary smiled at each other—they’d discussed it that morning, along with several other things, and decided it was fine for Max toknow what Clary could do. He had entrusted them with the manuscript of the prophecy, after all; they could trust him back.
“This I have to see” was all Max said.
They lingered over the pancakes. Max told them more about Noah, about how excited he would be to get the telescope for his birthday, and the camping trip they planned to take. “I promised we’d find him dark skies so he could finally see the Milky Way.”
Clary and Jace told Max about how they’d first met, and about Alec and Magnus, and Simon and Isabelle. Max, it turned out, loved a love story. He couldn’t get over the fact that Alec had married a warlock and Isabelle was marrying a mundane-turned-Shadowhunter who, by the way, had once been a vampire.
“Things reallyhavechanged,” he said.
Finally, he walked them into the backyard, so Clary could create a Portal. Before she could finish the rune, though, Max stopped her with a question. “Have you set a date for the wedding?”
“Not yet,” Jace said carefully. “But when we do…”
“Yeah, when you do…send me an invitation. You have my address now. And if you need help with the manuscript, the code…” Max gestured at Jace’s backpack. “Reach out to me, okay? I’ll be here.”
“Okay,” Jace said. Clary knew he was holding himself back from asking if Max was going to get in touch with Maryse, if Max would rather Maryse came to him, if he and Clary could help set up a meeting. Max wasn’t quite there yet; they both knew it. But they’d made a start, and that was better than nothing.
In fact, it was something. Something good. And in these times, good things were to be cherished.
Behind them, in the middle of Max’s autumn-bitten lawn, the Portal had begun to open; Clary could see a tunnel of swirlingcolors, and beyond it, the Institute’s front steps. Max was watching with a sort of wistful amazement; Clary smiled at him, and reached out her free hand to Jace, knowing he was there without having to look. He was always there when she needed him to be.
“Come on,” she said, interlocking her fingers with Jace’s. “I’ll race you home.”
