The Mortal Heart

“So what’s the question?” Marian asked.

“It’s about love, and how you know which kind it is. I mean, how do you know if it’s what my dad and mom had, or what my mom and Macon had? Because sometimes I think Macon haunts her in a way that my dad never will. And if that’s true, I don’t understand why they couldn’t find a way to stay together. Not that I wish they had. It’s just… how can I keep that from happening to Lena and me?” His face turned red, and his eyes lingered in the direction where Lena had gone.

Marian studied his face over her teacup. “Why does it matter now?”

“I can’t ask Dad, and Mom isn’t here. The closer this wedding stuff gets, the more it makes me think about Lena and me, and the more I want to know—how can you tell if it’s a forever thing?” He put down the cookies. “You were there, Aunt Marian. What happened with Macon and my mom? I know from the visions that Macon was scared he’d hurt her after he Transitioned, but if he really loved her, wouldn’t he have figured out a way?”

Marian set down her teacup, so hard that her saucer rattled. “I was there, and he loved her. Your mother was twenty-one years old and the most beautiful thing in either Carolina. Your father wasn’t even a thought in the back of her mind yet.”

“But Macon was?”

“And he was as dark and troubled and handsome and brilliant as you would expect. Almost as smart as your mother.”

Ethan nodded. “I can picture it. I mean them. Together.”

Marian shook her head. “You can’t. No one could. It wasn’t the sort of thing I’ve ever seen since the two of them.” It wasn’t exactly true, of course.

Not until now. Not until you and Lena, she thought.

“But even before your mother met Macon, she had to meet the Caster world. And she didn’t meet it through him.”

Ethan looked at Marian with dark eyes and an even darker understanding. “She met it through you.”

Marian raised her chin. “Your mother was my best friend, and it wasn’t a secret I could keep from her. Not for long.”

Even if it killed her, she thought. Even if it broke her heart and took everyone she loved from her. Even if it’s all my fault, and that’s something I have to live with, every day of my life.

“Tell me what happened,” Lila’s son said.

So Lila’s best friend did.





II. Sunday in the Rare Books Library


Thirty Years Earlier: Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

“In the Light there is Dark, and in the Dark there is Light,” Lila Jane Evers translated, holding the translucent scrap of parchment, no thicker than onionskin, between her fingertips. “Licentia in Lux Lucis. Freedom in Light.”

But freedom from what?

Lila Jane sat back in her hard wooden chair—at her customary table for one—in the rare documents reading room in the Perkins Library. She didn’t have time for this. It was close to the end of the term, and she was halfway through the final paper for her American Belief Systems seminar. She’d already pieced together three Latin passages from a prayer book said to have arrived in the New World with the original Winthrop fleet of the 1600s.

The page in front of her now was more difficult to place. Lila Jane chewed on her pencil, absentmindedly twisting her long brown hair into a half-knot on top of her head. She was no closer to uncovering the meaning of the mysterious lines than she had been yesterday, or the day before or the day before that. She traced the nineteenth-century script with a single white-gloved finger. The gloves were a requirement when working in the rare books library, but she loved them. They were respectful and glamorous, a sign of deference and humility. The past was to be honored. History was to be teased out and puzzled over. Understanding was a triumph—something no one outside this room seemed to understand.

Which was why Lila Jane Evers, possibly the most beautiful girl in North Carolina, certainly the most beautiful girl on the campus of Duke University (once nominated the Sweetheart of Sigma Chi, to her own embarrassment), only dated men who had first set foot inside the rare books library—which dramatically reduced her options.

That was fine with her.