In the Hour of Silence

Epilogue

I wish I could say that everything was perfect from then on out. That I just forgot about Luke and what he had done. I didn't, though. It never really left my mind that I'd been so easily deceived for six years.

But that would be a lie.

I never let this show. I never told Jace about the internal battle going on inside my head—why I had trouble completely trusting him. Why there were still some days where I chose not to speak.

It didn't feel right; and I'm not sure what part of it that felt that way. Maybe it was the fact that I felt Jace couldn't ever understand. Maybe it was that I still remembered the cocky son of a bitch Jace was when I first met him. Maybe it was just that I'm messed up from years of misguided trust and diligently obeying the command of a dead man. Either way, the mistrust was toxic.

I'm not proud of those years. Those were the times we fought non stop—Jace frustrated by the lack of trust and me frustrated because he couldn't understand.

I'll admit that we broke up and I'll admit it was my fault. I'll admit that I was the one to blame for myself reverting to my old ways and not uttering a word for six months.

Izzy had been beyond worried at me picking up a habit I had given up four years prior, but I managed to convince her not to tell Jace. After all, we weren't together and I was not his responsibility. There was also the fact that I didn't want him to know the effect the breakup had had on me.

Eventually, however, Magnus let it slip a week before my twenty first birthday. Next thing I knew Jace was knocking on the door of the apartment in Brooklyn Tessa and and I shared with a frantic look in his eyes. He barged in as soon as I opened the door, demanded the truth from me.

And so I gave it to him. I was finally honest about the struggle I had been having since the day I learned the truth about what Luke was. I had cried and he held me while I cried, patting down my unkempt hair like it was normal.

He didn't leave my side and he didn't seem to want to leave it ever again. It's kinda funny now that I think back to it. In the next few weeks we had unofficially become an official thing again. Neither of us had said anything about it—it just happened.

After that everything finally seemed a little more normal. Jace and I would hang out whenever we could afford it, he stayed over at my place three nights of the week, I was at him and Alec's a few nights, we usually had at least one night that was just to ourselves. Eventually, a few weeks after I turned twenty three, we decided it would be easier to just move in together; and, luckily, neither Tessa nor Alec minded as Magnus would finally get the love pad he always wanted and Will could officially move in with Tessa.

There was nothing extraordinary about our lives. We went to work like normal people, hung out with our friends whenever we got the chance, went on date nights, spent nights in.

It was all terribly mundane.

And so we decided to change that. So, we both took a leave of absence from work, sublet our apartment, and decided to do some traveling.

We went to London first and Jace showed me where his grandparents met and fell in love. He had never known his grandfather and his relationship with his grandmother had never been perfect. And yet, there was a light in his eye when he showed the places his father had told him about before he died.

After we were done in London we went to Paris—the city of my mother's dreams. This time it was my turn to pull him from place to place. It had always been my mother's plan to take a family trip to Paris for my eighteenth birthday. We would go to Notre Dame or le Sacré-Cœur as a family. Then, on my actual birthday, we would go to breakfast as a family, Mom and I would go to La Louvre while Jon and Dad did something they wanted to, and then we'd meet up for dinner later. A perfect day that we would never see.