Landon had to take a moment after Andrea finished telling her story about Hope and Henry. It felt like everything in his body was frozen, locked in place as he took it all in.
“Hope killed your first love?” he asked finally.
“Yeah.” Andrea closed her eyes and snuggled in closer. “And then she kidnapped our mom and practically handed her over to our family’s enemies.”
“I’m sorry.” He really, really was. “It must be hard seeing her around.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” Landon asked gently. 
Andrea sat up. “There’s not much to say about that part. She thought it would get our bio dad to come home. It was a stupid idea, and I told her it was reckless.” Andrea shook her head. She could tell by the lump in her throat that she was getting swept up in the past. “She didn’t listen to me. She just did what she wanted.”
“I’m sure she feels horrible.” Granted, Landon didn’t know Hope all that well, but she’d seemed nice enough. Nice enough at least to feel bad about accidentally killing her own mother. “Have you talked to her about it?”
Andrea laughed humorlessly. “Why is everyone at this school so into making peace and forgiving people?” It just didn’t work like that in the real world. She didn’t know what things were like at the Salvatore School, but she couldn’t imagine it actually worked out as well as people thought it did. 
“To be fair, it is kind of our thing,” Landon said. “Besides …” He reached out and took her hands in his. “... peace is better for the soul than war.”
Andrea smiled, and it was genuine this time.
“What?” Landon asked. 
She shook her head, still smiling. As she leaned in for the kiss, she whispered, “Nothing.”

“I had … a lot of guilt after my mom and Henry got killed,” Hope continued. She pulled at a loose thread in Lizzie’s blankets. “One day, I went to an abandoned church to just … I don’t know, let it all out?”
Hope could see herself back in that huge, vaulted room, screaming all of her misery and regret away. She could practically feel the gigantic waves of magic rolling off of herself.
“... except … the church wasn’t as abandoned as I thought.”
Declan’s face, pale and covered in blood from a wound on his head flashed across her vision. It was a sight she hadn’t been able to forget in all those years, not for lack of an effort. 
“Our stepdad, Declan, was in there, mourning our mom’s death where he wouldn’t be found.” Hope could barely get the words out now. “I had killed him.”
The breaking of her bones that first shift had been nothing compared to the pain she felt in the moment she felt for his pulse and realized there was none.
“That was how I triggered my curse,” Hope finished, her voice now barely a whisper. 
Lizzie shook her head. “You didn’t know.”
“I should’ve checked before I … lost control like that.”
Lizzie nodded, remembering the fear in her father’s eyes as he stepped into the kitchen and was almost met with a knife in the forehead. She couldn’t imagine what she’d have done if the knife sunk in. “I know the feeling.”
Hope gave her a tiny, rare smile. Lizzie didn’t realize until that very moment, but she liked Hope’s small smiles. They somehow felt more intimate than a big one.