#*books18

“Beware, Nephilim. As you slay others, so shall you be slain. Your angel cannot protect you against that which neither God nor the devil has made, an army born neither of Heaven nor Hell. Beware the hand of man. Beware.”

It was midsummer, midmorning, in the full light of day. There were no books to hide behind, and no shadows —only Lazlo Strange in his worn gray robes, with his nose that had been broken by fairy tales, looking like the hero of no story ever told. Or. No story yet told.

“In the east,“ she says after a time, her gaze still downcast, "there is a tradition known as kintsukuroi. It is the practice of mending broken ceramic pottery using lacquer dusted with gold and silver and other precious metals. It is meant to symbolize that things can be more beautiful for having been broken.” “Why are you telling me this?” I ask. At last she looks at me. Her irises are polished obsidian in the moonlight. “Because I want you to know,” she says, “that there is life after survival.”

Then, the winds change, wrapping around me like wings. I can feel them —my family. All of them. […] I can feel their love brushing against my skin. It banishes the shadows that crawl all over me. Even if they’ll never forget what I did to them, I know in my heart that they still love me. “I am loved.” I push against the shadow and fear that surround me.

“Lara Jean, I think you half-fall in love with every person you meet. It’s part of your charm. You’re in love with love.” This may be true. Perhaps I am in love with love! That doesn’t seem like such a bad way to be.

That’s a better story. Ending still needs some work. Forget about the ending. I only care about the endings we lived through today. Like how I stopped being someone afraid of the world and the people in it. And I stopped being someone I don’t like. You wouldn’t have liked me. And you wouldn’t have waited for me to be brave. Maybe it’s better to have gotten it right and been happy for one day instead of living a lifetime of wrongs.

Bram was right: people really are like houses with vast rooms and tiny windows. And maybe it’s a good thing, the way we never stop surprising each other.

And here I stood in the middle of a moonlit field, surrounded by wolves and they pressed against me, and in my secret heart, through these little bonds that I hadn’t known were there, I could hear whispers of songs and they were singing to me.