“There’s something different about him, and I don’t have to think hard to see it. Something about the way he takes over a room, the way he looks at me, like he has already identified and can disarm every one of my defense mechanisms with no effort, like he sees through them to the disaster lying beneath. And he wants it.”

“He reassures her, but he feels her soft laughter travel through their joined hands — how did that happen? — as they make their way downstairs.And he understands. He understands why people hold hands: he’d always thought it was about possessiveness, saying This is mine. But it’s about maintaining contact. It is about speaking without words. It is about I want you with me and don’t go.He wants her in his bedroom. And not in that way — no girl has ever been in his bedroom that way. It is his private space, his sanctuary. But he wants Clary there. He wants her to see him, the reality of him, not the image he shows the world. He wants to lie down on the bed with her and have her curl into him. He wants to hold her as she breathes softly through the night; to see her as no one else sees her: vulnerable and asleep. To see her and to be seen.”

“The sun flitered in through the small, dirty windows, catches his eyes. They are brown, ordinary, but the way he looks at me—no one has ever looked at me like he does. He looks at me like he sees something. Someone.Me."All right," he says, and puts his hands behind his head."Go ahead.”

“He didn't see me looking at him, but I could tell the ceremony was having the same effect on him. He was enraptured.It was a rare and sweet look for him, reminding me of the tortured artist that lived beneath the sarcasm. I liked that about Adrian—not the tortured part, but the way he could feel so deeply and then transform those emotions into art.”

“I followed the sensation,thinking of Lend. What it felt like to hold his hand. Watching him draw.Those precious times when he got to be nothing but himself around me. The way he laughed. The look he got in his eyes when he was about to say something he knew was clever. The way he looked at while I talked, like I was all he had ever wanted in the entire world.”

“Look at my glasses. I can't even see that there are any stars in the sky without them, but it's not the glasses that are doing the seeing, it's me, Madeleine. I don't think Father's eyes are seeing now, but he is. And maybe his brain isn't thinking, but a brain's just something to think through, the way my glasses are something to see through.”