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HAHAHAHHAHA, CRISTINA. 

And then I could see all of them in my mind—Thomas, Matthew, Alastair, but also Christopher and Cordelia and my own James and Lucie. It was all so long ago, but I could call up their faces as though it were yesterday.

I remember one evening, when there was a gathering at the Institute—some sort of party, it doesn’t matter, but James was a baby and Thomas was a baby. Someone, maybe old Lysander Gladstone, was trying to engage us in conversation, and I remember we fell asleep against one another right there on the loveseat, and the babies too. When we woke up it turned out Lysander had been highly offended and Will had had to explain to him about babies and new mothers. And we both startled because the children were gone, but of course Will and Gideon had come and retrieved them and put them in the nursery, and let us nap together there.

“I know you two don’t talk,” I said. “I don’t know why. Ty’s never told me why. But he’s never blamed you, or said it was because of anything you’d done. People fight,” I added. “It happens. I wish you were friends again, because when you were, it was pretty special.” Ty was so happy. But I didn’t say that. “But either way, regardless of anything happening with you and Ty, we all went through so much together. You’ll always be one of us. Family.”

Jem looking at Tessa like that is everything.

He grinned at me. “Hot,” he said. “Reminds me of you.”

I had to fold the real meaning of what I wanted to say into ordinary conversation, so when I’d say How are you, or Are you using the car today, I’d really mean, I love you, I love you.