She heard her own voice as if from very far away. “Why me?” she whispered. “Why me, Will?”
He hesitated. “After we brought you back here, after Charlotte found your letters to your brother, I—I read them.”
Tessa heard herself say, very calmly, “I know you did. I found them in your room when I was there with Jem.”
He looked startled. “You said nothing to me about it.”
“At first I was angry,” she admitted. “But that was the night we found you in the ifrit den. I felt for you, I suppose. I told myself you had only been curious, or Charlotte had asked you to read them.”
“She didn’t,” he said. “I pulled them out of the fire myself. I read them all. Every word you wrote. You and I, Tess, we’re alike. We live and breathe words. It was books that kept me from taking my own life after I thought I could never love anyone, never be loved by anyone again. It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them. Reading your words, what you wrote, how you were lonely sometimes and afraid, but always brave; the way you saw the world, its colors and textures and sounds, I felt—I felt the way you thought, hoped, felt, dreamed. I felt I was dreaming and thinking and feeling with you. I dreamed what you dreamed, wanted what you wanted—and then I realized that truly I just wanted you. The girl behind the scrawled letters. I loved you from the moment I read them. I love you still.”
Tessa had begun to tremble. This was what she had always wanted someone to say. What she had always, in the darkest corner of her heart, wanted Will to say. Will, the boy who loved the same books she did, the same poetry she did, who made her laugh even when she was furious. And here he was standing in front of her, telling her he loved the words of her heart, the shape of her soul. Telling her something she had never imagined anyone would ever tell her. Telling her something she would never be told again, not in this way. And not by him.
And it did not matter.
“It’s too late,” she said.
“Don’t say that.” His voice was half a whisper. “I love you, Tessa. I love you.”
She shook her head. “Will . . . stop.”
He took a ragged breath. “I knew you would be reluctant to trust me,” he said. “Tessa, please, is it that you do not believe me, or is it that you cannot imagine ever loving me back? Because if it is the second—”
“Will. It doesn’t matter—”
“Nothing matters more!” His voice grew in strength. “I know that if you hate me it is because I forced you to. I know that you have no reason to give me a second chance to be regarded by you in a different light. But I am begging you for that chance. I will do anything. Anything.”
His voice cracked, and she heard the echo of another voice inside it. She saw Jem, looking down at her, all the love and light and hope and expectancy in the world caught up in his eyes.
“No,” she whispered. “It isn’t possible.”
“It is,” he said desperately. “It must be. You cannot hate me as much as all that—”
“I don’t hate you at all,” she said, with great sadness. “I tried to hate you, Will. But I could never manage it.”
“Then, there’s a chance.” Hope flared in his eyes. She should not have spoken so gently—oh, God, was there nothing that would make this less awful? She had to tell him. Now. Quickly. Cleanly. “Tessa, if you don’t hate me, then there’s a chance that you might—”
“Jem has proposed to me,” she blurted out. “And I have said yes.”
“What?”
“I said that Jem proposed to me,” she whispered. “He asked if I would marry him. And I said I would.”
Will had gone shockingly white. He said, “Jem. My Jem?”
She nodded, without words to say.
Will staggered and put his hand on the back of a chair for balance. He looked like someone who had been suddenly, viciously kicked in the stomach. “When?”
“This morning. But we have been growing closer, much closer, for a long time.”
“You—and Jem?” Will looked as if he were being asked to believe in something impossible—snow in summertime, a London winter without rain.
In answer, Tessa touched with her fingertips the jade pendant Jem had given her. “He gave me this,” she said. Her voice was very quiet. “It was his mother’s bridal gift.”
Will stared at it, at the Chinese characters on it, as if it were a serpent curled about her throat. “He never told me anything. He never said a word about you to me. Not that way.” He pushed his hair back from his face, that characteristic gesture she had seen him make a thousand times, only now his hand was visibly shaking. “Do you love him?”
“Yes, I love him,” she said, and she saw Will flinch. “Don’t you?”
“But he would understand,” he said dazedly. “If we explained it to him. If we told him . . . he would understand.”
For just a moment Tessa imagined herself drawing the pendant off, going down the hallway, knocking on Jem’s door. Giving it back to him. Telling him she had made a mistake, that she could not marry him. She could tell him, tell him everything about herself and about Will—how she was not sure, how she needed time, how she could not promise him all of her heart, how some part of her belonged to Will and always would.
And then she thought of the first words she had ever heard Jem speak, his eyes closed, his back to her, his face to the moonlight. Will? Will, is that you? The way Will’s voice, his face, softened for Jem as it did for no one else; the way Jem had gripped Will’s hands in the infirmary while he’d bled, the way Will had called out James! when the warehouse automaton had knocked Jem down.
I cannot sever them, one from the other, she thought. I cannot be responsible for such a thing.
I cannot tell either of them the truth.
She imagined Jem’s face if she called off the engagement. He would be kind. Jem was always kind. But she would be breaking something precious inside him, something essential. He would not be the same afterward, and there would be no Will to comfort him. And he had so little time.
And Will? What would he do then? Whatever he might think now, she knew that if she broke things off with Jem, even then, he would not touch her, would not be with her, no matter how much he loved her. How could he parade his love for her in front of Jem, knowing his happiness came at the cost of his best friend’s pain? Even if Will told himself he could manage it, to him she would always be the girl Jem loved, until the day Jem died. Until the day she died. He would not betray Jem, even after death. If it had been anyone else, anyone else in the world—but she did not love anyone else in the world. These were the boys she loved. For better. And for worse.
She made her voice as cold as she could. As calm. “Told him what?”
Will only looked at her. There had been light in his eyes on the stairs, as he’d locked the door, when he’d kissed her—a brilliant, joyous light. And it was going now, fading like the last breath of someone dying. She thought of Nate, bleeding to death in her arms. She had been powerless then, to help him. As she was now. She felt as if she were watching the life bleed out of Will Herondale, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.