Marian wiped her face. "I guess you could think of it that way. Arelia recognized something in your mother, her ability to find the truth -- to see what is hidden. I think she was hoping your mother would find the answer, a way Casters and Mortals could be together. Light Casters have always hoped for that possibility. Genevieve wasn't the first Caster to fal in love with a Mortal." Marian looked off into the distance, where families were beginning to lay out their picnics on the sloping grass. "Or maybe she did it for her son."

Marian stopped walking. We had made another circle and were standing at Macon's grave. I could see the angel weeping in the distance. Only the grave looked nothing like it had at his funeral. Where there had only been dirt, now there was a wild garden shaded by two impossibly tal lemon trees, flanking either side of the headstone. In the shade, a bed of spreading jasmine and tangles of rosemary grew over his grave. I wondered if anyone had visited him today to notice.

I pressed my hands against my temples, trying to keep my head from exploding. Marian laid her hand gently on my back. "I know it's a lot to take in, but it doesn't change anything. Your mother loved you."

I shrugged Marian's hand away. "Yeah, she just didn't love my dad."

Marian jerked my arm, forcing me to face her. My mother may have been my mom, but she was also Marian's best friend, and I wasn't going to get away with questioning her integrity in front of Marian. Not today, or any day. "Don't you say that, EW. Your mother loved your father."

"But she didn't move to Gatlin for my dad. She moved here for Macon."

"Your parents met at Duke when we were working on our dissertation. As the Keeper, your mother was living in the Tunnels underneath Gatlin, traveling between the Lunae Libri and the university to work with me. She wasn't living in the town, in the world of the DAR and Mrs. Lincoln. So she did move to Gatlin for your father. She moved out of the darkness and into the light, and believe me, it was a big move for your mom. Your father saved her from herself when none of us could. Not me. Not Macon."

I stared at the lemon trees shading Macon's grave, and past them, to my mom's gravesite. I thought about my dad kneeling there. I thought of Macon, braving the Garden of Perpetual Peace, if only so he could rest one tree over from my mom.

"She moved into a town where no one accepted her, because your father wouldn't leave, and she loved him." Marian held my chin between her thumb and her fingers. "She just didn't love him first."

I took a deep breath. At least my whole life wasn't a total lie. She loved my dad, even if she loved Macon Ravenwood, too. I took the Arclight from Marian's hand. I wanted to hold it, to have a piece of both of them. "She never found the answer, the way Mortals and Casters can be together."

"I don't know if there is a way." Marian put her arm around me, and I leaned my head on her shoulder. "You're the one who might be a Wayward, EW. You tel me."

For the first time since I saw Lena standing in the rain, almost a year ago, I didn't know. Like my mom, I hadn't found any answers. Al I had found was trouble. Was that what she found, too?

I looked at the box in Marian's hands. "Is that why my mom died? Trying to find the answer?"

Marian took my hand and pressed the box into it, wrapping my fingers around it with hers. "I've told you what I know. Draw your own conclusions, but I can't interfere. Those are the rules. In the great Order of Things, I don't matter. Keepers never do."

"That's not true." Marian mattered to me, but I couldn't say it. My mom mattered. That part I didn't have to say.

Marian smiled as she lifted her hand, leaving the box in mine. "I'm not complaining. I chose this path, Ethan. Not everyone gets to choose their place in the Order of Things."

"You mean not Lena? Or not me?"

"You matter, whether you like it or not, and so does Lena. That's not a choice." She pushed the hair out of my eyes, the way my mom used to. "The truth is the truth. 'Rarely pure and never simple,' as Oscar Wilde would say."

"I don't understand."

"'Al truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.' "

"More Oscar Wilde?"

"Galileo, the father of modern astronomy. Another man who rejected his place in the Order of Things -- the idea that the sun didn't revolve around the Earth. He knew, perhaps better than anyone, that we don't get to choose what is true.

We only get to choose what we do about it."

I took the box, because deep down I knew what she was saying, even if I didn't know anything about Galileo and knew even less about Oscar Wilde. I was part of al this, whether I wanted to be or not. I couldn't run from it, any more than I could stop the visions.

Now I had to decide what to do about it.

6.17

Jump

When I crawled into bed that night, I was dreading my dreams. They say you dream about the last thing you were thinking about before you fel asleep, but the more I tried to not think about Macon and my mom, the more I thought about them. Exhausted from al that thinking about not thinking, it was only a matter of time before I sunk through the mattress into the blackness, and my bed became a boat....

The wil ows were waving over my head.

I could feel myself rocking back and forth. The sky was blue, cloudless, surreal. I turned my head and looked to the side. Splintery wood, painted a peeling shade of blue that looked a lot like the ceiling in my bedroom. I was in a dinghy or a rowboat, floating along the river.