“It is,” he said desperately. “It must be. You cannot hate me as much as al that—”
“I don’t hate you at al ,” she said, with great sadness. “I tried to hate you, Wil . 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 tel 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.”
Wil had gone shockingly white. He said, “Jem. My Jem?”
She nodded, without words to say.
Wil 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?” Wil 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.”
Wil 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 Wil 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 hal way, knocking on Jem’s door. Giving it back to him.
Tel ing him she had made a mistake, that she could not marry him. She could tel him, tel him everything about herself and about Wil —how she was not sure, how she needed time, how she could not promise him al of her heart, how some part of her belonged to Wil 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 Wil ’s voice, his face, softened for Jem as it did for no one else; the way Jem had gripped Wil ’s hands in the infirmary while he’d bled, the way Wil had cal ed 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 cal ed 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 Wil to comfort him. And he had so little time.
And Wil ? 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 Wil 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?”
Wil 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 bril iant, 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 Wil Herondale, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
“Jem would forgive me,” Wil said, but there was hopelessness in his face, his voice, already. He had given up, Tessa thought; Wil , who never gave up on any fight before it had started. “He . . .”
“He would,” she said. “He could never stay angry at you, Wil ; he loves you too wel for that. I do not even think he would hold anger toward me. But this morning he told me he thought he would die without ever loving anyone as his father loved his mother, without ever being loved like that in return. Do you want me to go down the hal way and knock on his door and take that away from him? And would you love me stil , if I did?”