123. Lily
LILY
There were meetings, lots of them. She somnambulated through them all, wishing she were anywhere else.
There were bank accounts, trusts—for her—all with a lot of money in them, all belonging to Windermere’s Heir.
She looked in the mirror and tried to understand this identity, but she could only catch glimmers.
Legally, her last name was still Perkins, even though, when she went through all the papers and traced the line down from the other side of the Hudson, her father should have been a Windermere.
She read Selene’s diary, and her heart clenched even as she exhaled.
Selene hadn’t killed herself, at least not how it seemed.
The years of alchemy, unprotected, had left her with mercury poisoning, a mind full of fog, her nerves on fire.
When she had died beneath the apple blossoms, as they floated like pink snow into what would later be named Orchard Lake, the vial of poison clutched in her fist hadn’t been death but relief at last. Lily couldn’t begrudge her that.
Windermere had been with her, had brewed the draught himself.
He’d held her hand until her last breath, until her body was cold and stiff, and his shock turned to grief.
They’d reconciled after years of silence in the months before her death.
Reading Windermere’s own journal entries stole her breath away.
She ached for this man, her grandfather separated by six generations, as she read his anticipation, his hope on one page, only for crushing sorrow to follow on the next.
Selene had made him promise that their son would have a place in his school once it was finished, and he had agreed without hesitation.
But, knowing his mother’s old enmity against Windermere and her early death on the man’s property, he had gone to learn magic unwillingly.
When, after a drunken dinner, Windermere had confessed the truth of his parentage, Jean van Bergen had flown into a rage, denouncing Windermere and Magic forever, claiming that both had killed his mother.
He married a mundane woman and never told her about Magic, ensuring that Windermere’s bloodline would be diluted into nothingness, at least until a young Magnolia Bellarius had fallen in love with a normal man who wasn’t so normal after all.
Cornelius Windermere had died old and alone, his heart giving out as he sat on the banks of his small lake. He’d outlived his lover and his daughter and was left only with a son he couldn’t claim, who hated him.
She read all of this, and then Seb read it all. She loaned the papers and journals to Chant. He asked if she’d consider donating them to the school’s archives to illuminate the true history. She didn’t know what to do and settled on doing nothing. They could decide when she was dead.
When Seb asked her why, she couldn’t quite explain.
“He kept all of this private,” she said, as she watched him ache down the hallway on a walker. “I don’t know if the world deserves it.”