He wasn’t good with relationships. He never had been. He could admit that to himself now. He’d been in dozens, and they’d all fallen apart—so he had all kinds of experience doing this wrong, but very little doing it right. He wanted to do it right. He loved Shallan, in part because of her eccentricities. She felt alive in a different way from everyone else—she was also somehow more authentic. She was stuffed full of personas and covered in illusions. Yet incredibly, she felt more real because of them.
