EDITED

Kaelie was going to the game tonight and Simon had said that he was going out to a burger bar with a couple of his chess friends, so Clary stayed at home. She showered and French braided her hair before getting into a pair of loose shorts and a singlet and went downstairs. One of the things that her mother actually shopped for was alcohol, and there was always wine and vodka mixes in the fridge, so she pulled out one of the passionfruit mixes, snapped off the lid and went out the back of the house.

They didn't have much of a view from the backyard, since they were more in the dip of the neighbourhood, than on the hill, but over the top of the walls that surrounded their limits, they could see the city in the distance. Clary finished off the bottle of vodka mix quickly and she thought about going back inside to get another one, but then Essex came out and settled on the end of the lounge chair, head on her shins, and Clary didn't want to disturb her. The sun was sinking lower in the horizon but there was still blue sky above her head, and there were colours dancing off the water of their kidney-shaped pool. Clary watched the ripples from the gentle breeze on the water, following them as they traveled from one end of the pool and then drifted to the other side.

Suddenly Essex lifted her head and her ears were twitching and then she jumped off the lounging chair and barked.

"Essie?" Clary frowned and straightened up, swinging her legs over the side of the chair and looking in the direction that Essex was trotting, toward the gate that lead out to their driveway.

And Isabelle.

The gate was locked from the inside, which meant that she had shimmied over the fence.

"What are you doing?" Clary got up from where she was sitting and crossed her arms over her chest. She didn't feel afraid of Isabelle being there, even though the other girl was taller than her and definitely scarier in her ripped black jeans and leather jacket and tattoo curling around her neck from up her chest, but she was still...Concerned. "And how—" she waved her hand toward the fence, even though it was obvious.

"I've been scaling fences since I was eleven," Isabelle glanced over her shoulder, back at the gate. "Mainly the ones to the public pools after hours," she turned back to look at Clary, and then down at her own pool. "Not all of us had our own private ones." Clary pursed her lips together and tightened the grip of her arms around herself, feeling the hairs across her arms all standing up and the tension in her shoulders gathering. She didn't say anything, because Isabelle hadn't answered her first question yet, and she wasn't going to apologize for having a pool. Isabelle took in a deep breath and let it out heavily through her nose. "Jace told me—us—that you know what happened," she stated. Clary licked her lips before dipping her head in a nod.

"Yeah," she confirmed, keeping her voice steady, even if her insides didn't feel that way. "He did." Isabelle nodded and then she looked down, shoving her hand into the pocket of her jacket and pulling something out.

"This is Max," she said, her voice flat as she held out what was in her hand. It was a photo, folded in the middle, maybe to make it smaller to fit inside a wallet. It looked as though it was an older photo, because there were a few other wrinkles on the photo as well, although not as deep as the fold in the middle. Clary took the picture and flattened it out, and it felt as though her breath was caught in her throat.

He had floppy brown hair, that was a lot lighter than both Alec and Isabelle's, and he had big grey eyes.

"I'm not sorry that Jace got closer to you to get closer to your family," Isabelle continued as Clary stared down at the picture. "To your brother and your father," those words came out with feeling, a lot more than her previous ones, almost in a hiss. "Because of what they did to my family, to my brother." Clary swallowed hard again, looking up from the picture and at Isabelle. "But..." Isabelle actually looked guilty, her eyes slipping from Clary and down to Essex, who was practically standing on Clary's feet. "I am sorry that you turned out to be a better person than we expected...Or at least, a person that Jace actually cares about." Clary felt her stomach twist at that and she hoped that her expression didn't give away the fact her heart practically started beating double time at the comment. She looked down at the picture and shook her head.

"He looks so young," she commented quietly. "Why was it him that went to jail?" Clary couldn't help but feel the same frustrations grow inside her that she had felt after she had processed things the first time. Clary didn't totally understand everything that went on with the Reapers, and she definitely didn't agree with a lot of it, and sending a teenager who hadn't even been sixteen on some mission that had the potential to—and did—result in him being but in jail, then why risk it. "Why was he delivering the drugs in the first place—he's just a kid!"

"He's not just a kid," Isabelle said sharply, obviously picking up on the annoyance that was laced in Clary's words. It wasn't that Clary was annoyed at Isabelle specifically, in fact, she didn't even know who she was getting angry at right now, it was just the whole fucking situation. "He's a prospect, and he was pulling his own weight, something that we all do—something that I wouldn't expect you to understand, but we have to earn our place." Clary gritted her teeth, and the tension that had slowly been fading before returned full force, and she couldn't stop the way her eyes narrowed. Isabelle was facing off in a similar way, expression pinched.

"It was your choice that he was doing that illegal shit, yours or Jace's dad or whoever makes that decision, it wasn't my dads. My dad wasn't the one that made him do that—and he wasn't the one who made him take that gun off Sebastian and spend even longer in jail," Clary snapped out. "That wasn't on him. Max could have—I don't know, he could have just—he just shouldn't have been there in the first place!" She didn't have answers, because she didn't know what the right thing was here—no one, it seemed, was in the right. There were just...Some people who were more in the wrong. She just hadn't figured out who that was yet.

The two girls stood facing each other, both of them with angry expressions on their faces, and Essex was no longer sitting down, she was standing up and her ears were alert. Isabelle was the first one who broke the stare down, and she took in a deep breath as though trying to calm herself down.

"Look," she said through gritted teeth, and it was obviously hard for her to lower her voice and keep things sounding almost civil. "I don't want to fucking fight with you or anything, because I've heard you with Jace, and I've heard about you with Maia and Magnus, and given we've got different opinions, neither of us are going to budge." It actually sounded pretty mature, Clary had to grudgingly admit. "I came here because I wanted you to see the face of the person that suffered the most because of your prick of a father and your coward of a brother," her words were back to being pissed, although not quite as much as earlier. "And I also...I also wanted to say that even though I don't like you..." she didn't look happy about what she was going to say next, a nerve in her cheek jumped. "I've never Jace look as broken up as he has in these past few weeks."

Clary's heart doubled in pace again, at the mention of Jace, and the fact that maybe he was hurting half as much as she was.

"That's all I I came to say," she shrugged as she glanced around. "And I guess to the see the way the other half lived." She took her time, eyes looking over at the pool house on the far side of the backyard, which had been where Jonathan pretty much lived when he had been at home, then toward the house, where the double glass doors were opened into the cream and silver colour-schemed lounge. Then Isabelle turned around and started walking back toward the fence.

"Oh—wait," Clary took a few steps forward, holding out the picture in her hand. Isabelle glanced back over her shoulder and shook her head.

"You keep it," she replied before easily gripping the sides of the gate, jumping and shimmying herself up and over. She landed on the other side silently and then Clary guessed that she was gone. She looked back down at the picture and rubbed her hand over her forehead.

Isabelle had said that Max wasn't a kid, but the person in this picture...He was just a boy. His hair was a little wavy, as though he hadn't had a haircut in a while, his cheeks still held some baby fat, cherub-like, and his eyes were dancing and full of life—she could see that, even just in a picture. Clary swallowed hard and forced her eyes away from the picture to look back in the distance, like she had been before Isabelle had just appeared in her backyard.

Jace had said that Max had celebrated his sixteenth birthday while he had been locked up. Clary's sixteenth birthday had been a big party at the beach club, the whole place booked out by her parents with caterers serving food and alcohol being served at a bar who was paid enough not to worry about keeping it away from the underage people at the club.

They had very different birthdays.

And then there would be his seventeenth...Which Clary had celebrated late last year. The house had been completely decked out in blue and silver balloons and streamers and it had been tacky and over the top and Clary had loved it, because Kaelie and her mother had gotten together and organised it, and Simon had even dressed up in a shiny blue waistcoat, and it had been fun.

And Max...He was going to be in jail.

Yeah, he had been doing illegal stuff, but Clary's father had as well. He had lied to the police and made things a lot worse than they had to be.

And because of that, two people had ended up in jail, a lot longer than they really had to be.

Before Clary really knew what she was doing, she was heading back into the house, Essex at her ankles, slamming the double doors shut before snatching up her keys from the counter and stalking toward the front door of the house, her breaths coming out heavily.