Page 35 of Better in Black
In the airport, you waited for an answer that never came. I couldn’t reassure you leaving was the right thing—but I also couldn’t tell you it was the wrong one.
Was it cowardly to stay silent? Would it have been selfish to speak?
I suppose it doesn’t matter. Life unfolds as it does, and there’s no going back. You told me you needed to leave the past behind, and I stood by and watched you do it.
—
I tried returning to the woods. To my pack, the only family left to me. But after Paris, even the woods no longer felt like home. I was still too much Shadowhunter for the lycanthropes—and still too much lycanthrope for the Shadowhunters. I was, for the first time, truly without you.
And for so long, I was alone.
—
You’d told me not to follow you. I tried to honor your wishes. Even though it tortured me, not knowing if you were safe. What if something happened to you, and I wasn’t there? What if something happened and I never even knew?
There was one person you might have trusted enough to ask for help, and so I found myself back in Idris, at Madeleine Bellefleur’s doorstep, hoping she wouldn’t throw me off her property on sight.
I can’t say she was delighted to see me. But you know Madeleine—a steel will, but a soft touch. She let me in the door.
“You have some nerve, Lucian, to come sniffing around here. But I suppose you always have.”
“You don’t have to tell me where she is,” I said. “Just tell me if she’s all right.”
Madeleine handed me a mug of tea, and shook her head. “Oh, Lucian. Still? Even after everything that’s happened? And I suppose you still haven’t told her.”
Madeleine knew my heart from the beginning, of course. From that night I took her to the dance, and all through the painful months I tried to persuade myself I could love her instead of you.I should have never let it stretch on as long as it did; I shouldn’t have waited for her to be the one to tell me she deserved better. And when she did, the first words out of my mouth should not have been “Please don’t tell Jocelyn why we broke up.” The casual cruelty of adolescence—so many wounds inflicted without a second thought.
“She sent me a letter,” Madeleine admitted. “She’s safe. Building a new life for herself.”
“And now you’re going to tell me not to screw it up for her?”
“Would I waste my breath on that? When have you ever listened to anyone but yourself, Lucian Graymark? Especially on the subject of Jocelyn.”
“We both know who I’ve listened to, Madeleine.” I set down the tea. I’d lost my appetite for comfort. “Valentine saw it in me from the start. That I was looking for someone to tell me what to do.”
“That can’t really be what you think.”
I’d wrestled with the question for years, why Valentine had chosen me. There were so many students who were stronger than I was, smarter, fiercer, better with words or weapons. Why me, if not because he recognized something in me he knew he could control?
“You know what Jocelyn told me, back when she was first getting to know him, before she totally lost herself?” Madeleine smiled, when she said your name. There was a hint of heartbreak in it. The two of you had been so close, before Valentine—but how were you supposed to love two people who hated each other so fiercely? You loved Valentine, Madeleine couldn’t stand him, and you chose him over her. I knew she’d forgiven you, but I saw she hadn’t forgotten.
Nous n’oublierons jamais.
“She told me he was good at pinpointing weakness, but histrue genius was finding hidden strength, and exploiting it for his own purposes. He didn’t pick you for your weakness, Lucian—he picked you for your greatest strength. Your loyalty. He knew it was a double-edged sword—that you’d always ignore yourself and your needs for the people you love.”
“Jocelyn told you that?”
“The first part, yes. The rest I figured out for myself. You hide so much of yourself from the people you love, Lucian. And maybe you don’t mind that keeping yourself a secret means they can never wholly know you. But has it occurred to you that hiding so much of yourself means you can never truly know them either? It’s why you failed to see what Valentine was. It’s why you’ll never know Jocelyn, not really.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? I know her better than anyone!”
“I imagine she’d say the same about you. So how is it that she doesn’t know the most important thing?”
The most important thing: that I love you.
“How many small lies sit between you, to protect that one core truth?”
Madeleine was, after all those years, nearly a stranger to me. But sometimes it takes a stranger to introduce you to yourself.
