This wisdom of Maura’s made Blue quite cross for some reason.

“Say something,” Orla said.

Blue didn’t quite know how to say it; she didn’t know quite what it was. “It … just feels like such a waste. Falling in love with all of them.” All of them really meant all of them: 300 Fox Way, the boys, Jesse Dittley. For a sensible person, Blue thought that maybe she had a problem with love. In a dangerous voice, she added, “Don’t say ‘it’s good life experience.’ Do not.”

“I’ve loved a lot of people,” Orla said. “I would say it’s good life experience. Anyway, I told you ages ago those guys were going to leave you behind.”

“Orla,” snapped Calla, as Blue’s next breath was a little uneven. “It confounds me, sometimes, to imagine what you must tell your poor clients on the phone.”

“Whatever,” said Orla.

Maura shot Orla a dark look over her shoulder, and then said, “I wasn’t going to say good life experience. I was going to say that leaving helps, sometimes. And it’s not always a for ever goodbye. There’s leaving and coming back.”

Jimi rocked Blue. The toilet lid creaked.

“I don’t think I can go to any of the colleges I want,” Blue said. “The counsellor doesn’t think so.”

“What do you want?” Maura asked. “Not out of college. Out of life.”

Blue swallowed the truth once, because she was ready to move from crisis and crying to solutions and stability. Then she said the truth slowly and carefully, so that it would be manageable. “What I always wanted. To see the world. To make it better.”

Maura also seemed to be choosing her words carefully. “And are you sure that college is the only way to do that?”

This was the sort of impossible answer Blue’s guidance counsellor would give her after looking at her financial and academic situation. Yes, she was sure. How else could she change the world for the better, without finding out first how to do it? How could she get a job that would pay her to be in Haiti or India or Slovakia if she didn’t go to college?

Then she remembered that it was not her guidance counsellor asking; it was her psychic mother.

“What do I do?” Blue asked cannily. “What have you guys seen me doing?”

“Travelling,” Maura replied. “Changing the world.”

“Trees in your eyes,” Calla added, more gently than usual. “Stars in your heart.”

“How?” Blue asked.

Maura sighed. “Gansey’s offered to help you, hasn’t he?”

It was a guess that didn’t require psychic ability, only a minimal grasp of Gansey’s personality. Blue angrily tried to get up; Jimi wouldn’t let her. “I’m not going to ride the Gansey charity train.”

“Don’t be like that,” Calla said.

“Like what?”

“Bitter.” Maura considered, and then added, “I just want you to look at your future as a world where anything is possible.”

Blue shot back, “Like Gansey not dying before April? Like me not killing my true love with a kiss? Any of those possibilities?”

Her mother was quiet for a long minute, during which Blue realized that she was longing naively for her mother to tell her that both of those predictions could be wrong and that Gansey would be all right. But finally, her mother simply replied, “There’s going to be life after he dies. You have to think about what you’re going to do after.”

Blue had been thinking about what she was going to do after, which was why she’d had a crisis in the first place. “I’m not going to kiss him, anyway, so that can’t be how he goes.”

“I don’t believe in the concept of true love,” Orla said. “It’s a construct of a monogamous society. We’re animals. We make love in the bushes.”

“Thanks for your contribution,” Calla said. “Let’s give Blue’s prediction a call and let it know.”

“Do you love him?” Maura asked curiously.

“I’d rather not,” Blue replied.

“He has lots of negative qualities I can help you hone in on,” her mother offered.

“I’m already aware of them. Infinitely. It’s stupid, anyway. True love is a construct. Was Artemus your true love? Is Mr Gray? Does that make the other one not true? Is there just one shot and then it’s over?”

This last question was asked with the most flippancy of any of them, but only because it was the one that hurt the most. If Blue was nowhere near ready to take on Gansey’s death, she was certainly nowhere near ready to take on the idea of him being dead long enough for her to happily waltz into a relationship with someone she had not even met yet. She just wanted to keep being best friends with Gansey for ever, and maybe one day also have carnal knowledge of him. This seemed like a very sensible desire, and Blue, as someone who had sought to be sensible her entire life, was feeling pretty damn put out that this small thing was being denied her.

“Take my mom card,” Maura said. “Take my psychic card. I don’t know the answers to these questions. I wish I did.”

“Poor baby,” Jimi murmured into Blue’s hair. “Mmm, I’m so glad you never got any taller.”

“For crying out loud,” Blue said.

Calla heaved herself to standing, grabbing for the shower rod to balance herself. The bathwater churned beneath her. She swore. Orla ducked her head as water drained from Calla’s blouse.

Calla said, “Enough crying altogether. Let’s go make some pie.”

Five hundred miles away, Laumonier smoked a cigarette in the main room of an old harbour ferry. The room was charmless and utilitarian – dirty glass windows set in raw metal, everything as cold as the black harbour and just as fishy smelling. Birthday decorations remained from a previous celebration, but age and dim lighting rendered them colourless and vaguely ominous as they rattled in a draught.

Laumonier’s eyes were on the distant lights of the Boston skyline. But Laumonier’s mind was on Henrietta, Virginia.

“First move?” Laumonier asked.

“I don’t know if this is an action item,” Laumonier replied.

“I would like some answers,” Laumonier said.

The Laumonier triplets were mostly identical. There were slight differences – one was a hair shorter, for instance, and one had a noticeably broader jaw. But what individuality they had in appearance they had destroyed by a lifelong practice of only using their surname. An outsider would know he was not speaking to the same Laumonier that he had at a prior visit, but the brothers would have both referred to themselves by the same name, so he would have to treat them as the same person. There were not really Laumonier triplets. There was only Laumonier.