Page 36 of Better in Black
Not that I wanted to hear it. I got out of there as quickly and politely as I could. I’d gotten what I came for. I knew you were safe, for the moment at least. I knew you didn’t want me to come looking for you.
I felt lost. And as so often happens when that is the case, I found my way back to the woods. Not to the pack, not this time. I returned to the edge of Brocelind Forest nearest my parents’ house. I followed in my childhood footsteps, into the trees, into the night, and found myself at the clearing where I’d first faced my own fearof the dark. Where I’d first succumbed to my fear of revealing myself to you.
I brought no camping gear, no weapons. Nothing for safety or ease. I wanted nothing between me and the wild. I lay down on a patch of earth beneath one of the towering trees, and stared up past the canopy, searching for a moon, thinking of you. Thinking, too, of that first night in the dark, and its consequences.
Thinking, for the first time in a long time, of my mother.
Our story had seemed simple: I went into the woods, and because of that, she made a promise she had to keep. I made a rash decision, and she paid the price. We all did.
As a child, I had assumed myself at the center of every decision my mother made. If she left us for the Iron Sisters, it was because of how much she loved me. If she refused to come back, it was because she didn’t love me enough. I’d never thought to reexamine the story as an adult.
But what if, I thought, the earth beneath me, the sky above, the woods welcoming me home. What if she became an Iron Sister simply because she wanted to? What if she stayed not because she didn’t love me enough, but because she loved them more? What if her choices were not about me at all? What if I’d never known my mother, not really, because of all the pieces of herself she’d kept hidden—and because I’d failed to see her clearly, with so much of myself in the way?
What if I’d failed to see you clearly too, because I saw everything you said and did as an answer to the question I refused to ask:
Could you ever love me?
—
That was why I came looking for you, Jocelyn. Not because I loved you, not because I couldn’t stand to be without you—that hadalways been true, from the start. It was because I needed to tell you the truth. Not so I could find out once and for all how you felt, but so you could finally understand how I did. So I could stop hiding myself, and finally see you, the person I loved most in the world, for who you are. Before it was too late.
Of course, deciding to find you was not the same as successfullydoingit. You’d disappeared entirely—if I could find you easily, then Valentine could too. For all I knew, his forces were watching me, waiting for me to lead them straight to your door. So I had to search carefully, quietly. And without any clue where to begin.
I let chance steer me, or fate, if you want to call it that. I searched in all the places I thought you might love, and then in all the places I thought you would hate, just in case you’d imagined them the last place anyone would look. I crossed continents. I couldn’t ask too many questions, because anyone who knew me would know that if I was searching for a woman, she could only be you. And if I was searching for a woman with a child, it could only be Valentine’s.
It was a slow quest, and for a long time a futile one.
When does this end, I wondered. Would I waste my whole life, looking for someone who didn’t want to be found?
Would I forever be doing as Valentine predicted, making of myself a sacrifice no one would witness and no one would want?
I’d almost given up hope of finding out, when I reached New York, and, of course: There you were.
First as a painting in a gallery window—I told Clary it was a painting of Idris, and it was. But buried in the lush greens you’d hidden two small, unmistakable figures, holding hands. You’d painted our childhood, and it felt like a sign.
You weren’t ready to erase the past. Not entirely.
You hadn’t erased me.
—
You know the rest, Jocelyn. You know I found you and your daughter and the life you’d built in the mundane world. You told me you were happy, and you meant it. But you were also lonely, you said. You were hiding so much of yourself from the world, even from Clary—from Clary most of all.
“I’m starting to feel invisible,” you said, that first time after I’d found you.
“I see you,” I said, and for the first time, I did.
I’d come prepared to tell you I loved you, no matter what—and so, for the first time, I wasn’t searching your expression for clues, evidence that you did or did not feel the same way. I wasn’t trying to hide the brightest, truest part of myself. I wasn’t thinking of myself at all.
And so, finally, I saw you clearly. I saw that more than anything, you needed a friend.
Maybe this sounds like more of the same to you. But it felt different: It felt honest, this time, my silence. Because I needed it too, your friendship, your happiness, your safety.
The rest, I decided in that moment, and every day after, could wait.
—
Hiding for the right reasons is still hiding.
