I really and truly thought the book was building to a reveal of Jael as unreliable narrator on the same scope as her husband, with the actual truth somewhere in between -- which wouldn't rule her out as the endgame love interest, I think! You'd just have to do a lot more work to get there after that, but it would be fun and interesting work! And without that, the book does feel out-of-balance, though I enjoyed it a whole lot regardless. (I also blinked a little at the Inquisition backstory, but I do trust Rose Lerner on her research stats, so I checked out of curiosity and there were over 100 executions by auto-da-fe in the first half of the eighteenth century, which is still quite a lot! It's working on the tail end of the timeline but I do think the timeline still works, and I'll forgive her for it because forging a thematic link between the Gothic wife house fire and the public witch/Jew/heretic fire is SO galaxy brain conceptually.)