“I’m sorry?” I said.
“Nope, it’s definitely me who should be sorry,” Ethan told me. “I know that everyone watches you and tries to be close to you and that it bothers you. I know you’ve been through something that neither I nor anyone else here can imagine, and that you obviously don’t want to talk about it—so I’m also very sorry that I’m talking about it. I tried to take a table that was pretty far away and not to look too much. Because you clearly don’t need anyone else staring, even if you’re beautiful. And it’s not just about that: you’re brave—you did something really amazing. Obviously I looked once or twice, and I wasn’t as subtle as I thought I was being. So, I’m sorry.”
He spoke as if he felt bad for upsetting me more than he felt anything for himself.
It was weird, having someone say something like that to me, and having it seem genuine. But it was almost nice, and there hadn’t been a lot of nice things in my life, not for a long time. I liked that he had called me brave instead of good. Everyone called me good.
I knew neither was true, but it was still a nice change.
I cleared my throat again. “I was going to say that I know you tutor a couple of the younger kids, and I’m finding it really hard to catch up. I was wondering if you had a tutoring spot open.”
“Oh,” Ethan said. “Right.” He rumpled his thick dark hair back with one hand, and I saw the tips of his ears go pink. “I can do that. I do have a price, however. I will require that you immediately self-induce amnesia about the last five minutes.”
I held on to the back of the chair opposite his, and he was quiet. He gave me all the time and space I needed to decide.
I sat down opposite Ethan and said, “I can do that.”
Ethan taught me how to catch up at school, taught me how to live in the Light city. He never took any payment. He never had a reason to do any of it, except that he had decided to care about me, and that he would keep caring about me no matter how I felt about him. When Penelope’s husband, Jarvis, lost his security job, Ethan made sure his father gave Jarvis another one working in Stryker Tower itself and making plans for where best to deploy the Light guards throughout the Dark city. Ethan did it to make me happy: he did it because he knew I owed Penelope and Jarvis, and my debts were his.
I was a bad girlfriend. I don’t say that because I felt guilty about it or like I owed Ethan. When you are broken and someone puts you back together, there isn’t any way to repay that. I woke up screaming in Ethan’s arms, lashed out to hurt him when I felt trapped or angry.
I didn’t grow to love him because I was grateful. I loved him because he was the best and sweetest thing in my life, because being with him was always something I could look forward to, and because he made a new life for me and gave it to me as a gift, for no reason other than that he loved me back.
Anyone would love him, but I do not know if anyone could love him as much as I do.
I saved my father, and Ethan saved me. Maybe that is the only thing I have ever learned about love: love is when you save someone no matter what the cost.
Now that I knew Ethan had a doppelganger, I knew that someone had paid any price to save him once already.
I’ve heard the process of making a doppelganger explained like this: Human souls are made of light. It is what makes people able to feel, to love and pity each other, and if there is an excess of light, it is what enables people to do Light magic. If a soul is slipping into the dark, the dark will give the light back . . . if the light gives the darkness form.
One goes into the shadow of death, but two come back: the real person, and the other, a creature made in the person’s image, but out of darkness.
People are frightened by the idea of them, of something that looks human and is all darkness. Doppelgangers used to be slaughtered with less of a penalty than you received for killing a family pet, until thirteen years ago, when Charles Stryker, Ethan’s father, changed the laws. Officially doppelgangers were human now, and it was murder to kill them. Still, we all know of doppelgangers murdered as soon as they were created, found in the Hudson River with their telltale faces destroyed, or beaten to death by people who hated them for their hoods alone.
The law says doppelgangers must wear hoods to hide their stolen faces, hoods fastened with collars that only someone with Light magic rings can take off. Nobody would ever change that law. Real people needed to be protected from the soulless.