Once Upon a Broken Heart

“How do you know if you have nothing to compare it with? If you end up with Luc, you might even wish that I’d asked you to kiss more than three people.”

This line appears in one of the first conversations between Evangeline and Jacks. Jacks is teasing Evangeline about kissing more people here, but the points he makes are valid ones, nonetheless. Evangeline has led an innocent, sheltered life. She likes kissing Luc because it’s all she knows. If she never kisses anyone else, she’d probably live a happy life with Luc, but it’s possible she’d find someone she likes kissing more than Luc. Jacks is right that she has nothing to compare Luc’s kisses to, and thus, she cannot make an accurate assessment of whether Luc is a good kisser.

“But Evangeline knew the difference. She also knew that sometimes there was a murky space in between good and evil. That was the space she’d thought she’d entered that morning when she’d gone into Jacks’s church to pray for a favor. But she’d made a mistake, and now it was time to fix it.”

Here, Evangeline has just discovered Luc, Marisol, and their wedding guests have been turned to stone as a result of her deal with Jacks. Jacks says he’s helping her get over Luc and achieve wealth and a better life, but faced with people turned to statues because of something she did, Evangeline can’t comprehend his logic. Her humanity allows her to see suffering where Jacks’s Fate nature shows him an opportunity regardless of who it might hurt. Evangeline sees the world in terms of good (things that help) and bad (things that harm) with little room for the gray area in-between.