Brad, her Husband

Oh, Brad, where do I start?

It's like one of those relationships where someone is stressed to the breaking point and then just savages you, and you are sitting there wondering, where did that come from?

Yeah, that.

Brad loves her, and they love each other, but there is that undercurrent of something else wrong. During the first major Brad scene, where she wakes up and has those scars on her back, he's a great guy. This is the first real chance we get to see him without him doing something stupid in another timeline and getting himself killed, so it was critical and important they share some quality time together. It's a great scene, and it shows how much he cares about her.

And then things turn dark.

It's her own fault, she goes back to try and undo what's been done, and she makes a mess out of it and end up getting everyone else except Brad killed - leaving her younger self and Brad alone in the house together, the world outside still ending. He's a wreck, just quiet for the longest time with her, and she's numb, having seen this story before.

She has her wings too, so this is the first and only time he gets to see them on her younger self.

Brad hints at the fuzzy nature of time travel and changing the past, and his mind is already a bit mind-toasted from having to forget about the earlier incident where she fainted in his arms from having seen the scars on her back. This should have warned her that messing with the past and the future is not a good thing - but it doesn't. She's in full selfish mode here, and understandably so, and she just messed up her shot at setting things right because her older self won't listen.

She gets herself into this twice in a way, she caused the paradox, and her older self didn't listen - a two-sided coin with the same side on each.

He blames her, and yes, well, I can't blame him. He goes after her savagely with verbal attack after attack, she's special, he's not. She's young again, he's not. She's immune, he's not. He just lost everyone he loves, and she doesn't have to worry about that because it never happened for her. It's a brutal scene, and it was tough to write, and she is just devastated by this turn.

She does the only thing she can do, she leaves an angry and upset mess.

And she walks into the Four Horsemen's arms.

It's her descent into darkness, and her clear break from the past, and something Heinrich presses her on ruthlessly in the next scene where she's staring at her own grave. It is a very emotional and raw pair of chapters, and its savages her psyche. I don't know how she recovers from this, honestly. Well, she almost dies as War enters from stage right, and she flees in one of the most visually shocking action scenes I would ever want to see on the big screen with an entire cemetery exploding and flaming coffins exploding around her as she runs for her life.

Brad pushes her into this, and in some ways it is her fault. There was an undercurrent in this relationship that comes out where he feels she is just using him and their family for some expedient way out of her family's life, and it is painful and comes out at exactly the wrong moment. Or the right one, family stuff like this is always raw and emotional, and the two of them are not perfect.

But her older self and Brad do end up the story on a more positive note, along with their children, alive and well. It is a bittersweet ending, and her younger self walks away from having anything to do with them anymore - letting them live their lives. She walks away, and it's a sad thing for her, but what can she do? As an angel of death, there's no way she can ever be a part of that family again, so she has to let go.

It's a sort of thing where despite the relationship's problems, you carry on despite. There is a victory of ignorance here, or you can see it as the past really not mattering and what's now winning. This entire situation is born out of thinking to the past and regretting how your life came out, and not being able to change things. Her younger self in a way is that emotion, that desire to change the present by regrets in the past, and it doesn't work. Her older self ends up being quite happy with the way things are, and her younger self walks away, letting them be happy and accepting that.

I think this is one of the deepest storylines in the book, and true to what the book is about.

When she leaves Brad, things start to move for her younger self. There is a ticking clock started here for the ending, she is fighting to stop the same end of the world that destroyed their family, and her older self's relationship with Brad. Those undercurrents and feelings will never come out, and maybe that's for the better for these two.

But younger Jessica will always know those words and that pain.

She sacrifices the life she could have had, takes all the pain and scars on herself, saves them without them knowing any better, and walks away. She's on another road now, with the shadow of her black wings over her and her life. She realizes she can't go back and change things. She lives with that and moves on.

It's heroic and heartbreaking all the same.