Chapter 8

I stayed at Jackson’s shack for three days straight. There was nothing for me anywhere else. Changing bandages, pressing pills into my patient’s mouth, taking his vitals—those at least were things I could do. As soon as my week was up and the hospital would take me back, I’d leave, but for now, I bided my time.

There was a single piece of paper in the pocket of my scrubs. I folded it and unfolded it a hundred different ways. I’d made my decision: Toby Hawthorne was going to live if I had to drag him from the jaws of death myself. He was going to live with what he’d done.

“You should get some sleep.” Jackson tried speaking to me at most twice a day.

“I don’t need to sleep,” I said. I’d gotten a few hours here and there since I’d started down this forsaken path. Jackson had fed me—with the groceries I’d bought him, no less.

“Your body will give out on you sooner or later, little Hannah.”

Up until that point, I never would have pegged the town recluse, whose hobbies included firing warning shots and physically chasing people away from an abandoned lighthouse, as a mother hen.

“My body is fine,” I said.

A voice, rough as sandpaper, came from the mattress: “That makes one of us.”

Jackson and I were both shocked into silence. I recovered first. “You’re awake.”

“Unfortunately.” Toby Hawthorne was smart enough to not try to sit up. He didn’t even open his eyes. “If you’re so set on not sleeping,” he continued, the pain in his sandpaper voice matched only by its arrogance, “then perhaps you wouldn’t mind shutting the hell up?”

It was like I was right back in that bar, watching him smirk and lean against the pool table, his glass balanced precariously on its edge.

Gritting my teeth, I crossed the room and started checking his vitals. Pulse first—my fingers on his neck. Then breathing—the rise and fall of his chest, breath against my palm. Pupil reactivity. I needed to touch his face for that one. His eyes were closed. I pried them open.

“This isn’t what I meant when I told you to shut up.” His voice was lower than it had been in the bar, rougher.

“You don’t give me orders.” I finished my check of his pupils. “Follow the light with your eyes.”

“What will you give me if I do?” he quipped.

This was the first time I’d been able to do anything approximating a neurological exam, and the asshole apparently didn’t intend to make it easy. “A quick and merciful death,” I sniped.

He followed the light with his eyes. I tested the feeling in his fingers and toes, ran my pen lightly over the arch of his foot. His body did all the right things.

“Pay up,” my patient said.

I’d promised him a quick death. “As it happens, I lied.”

“You have a name, liar?” Even with smoke-damaged vocal cords, he had a way of making questions sound like silky demands. I didn’t reply. “Better yet,” he continued, addressing the words to the ceiling, his eyes closing, “what’s mine?”

“Your what?” I bit out.

“My name.”

I stared at him, certain that he was messing with me, but my patient didn’t say anything else, and a trickle of uncertainty began to snake its way through my mind.

“My name,” he repeated, less demand than command this time.

“Harry.” Jackson came to stand over the two of us. It took me a moment to realize that he’d given Toby an answer—the wrong one. Then again, I’d never had any indication that Jackson Currie actually knew who he had in this shack.

“Harry,” Toby echoed. It was the arch tone with which he said the fake name Jackson had just given him that convinced me that the Hawthorne heir wasn’t putting on a show.

He really didn’t remember his own name.

“Harry what?” he asked.

“Don’t know.” Jackson gave a half-grunt, half-snort, which very effectively communicated that not only did he not know Harry’s last name—he didn’t care. “I’m Jackson.” His gruff voice grew gruffer. “She’s Hannah.”

“Hannah,” the burned boy repeated, his voice smoky and hoarse. “Spelled the same backward as forward—assuming there’s an H on the end?”

Suddenly, I was right back at the bar again. What about you, palindrome girl? H-A-N-N-A-H. Will I see you around? We could have a little fun, set the world on fire…

He’d known—even then, he’d already known what kind of game he’d come to Hawthorne Island to play. I had no idea why a boy with everything would have been angry enough, reckless enough to want to play with fire. All I knew was that to him, it had been a game.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” The question escaped my lips before I could stop it.

The target of my ire almost managed a smirk. “You’re the doctor. You tell me.”

“Nurse.” My correction was automatic.

“Mendax,” he replied. He gave it a moment, and then: “It’s Latin, for liar.” Pain slashed through his features, but he seemed dead set on ignoring it. “I appear to be the kind of person who recognizes lies when I hear them. You aren’t a nurse, not exactly.” He paused, breathing through the pain. “If I had to make an educated guess about the circumstances that brought me here—and it appears I’m the type to do that, too—I would say that I am most likely a horrible, horrible individual and someone wanted me dead. Am I getting warm, not-nurse Hannah?”

“You don’t remember.” That was Jackson, coming to the same conclusion I had.

“Amnesia.” I said the word out loud and thought about his head wound. I’d been more focused on the burns, but maybe I shouldn’t have been.

“Tell me, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward: Are you the one who bashed my head in?” Toby tried to sit up.

My hands went automatically to his shoulders, skirting the burns. “I’m the one who’s going to,” I told him, “if you don’t lay back.”

He gave in to my command—or to the pain. His eyes went heavy-lidded, and for a moment, I thought he might pass out again, but no such luck.

“I don’t know who you or Too Much Beard over there are,” Toby said. “Hell, I don’t know who I am. But I have the distinct feeling that I’m the kind of person who could bring your entire world crumbling down… just… like… that.”

He snapped his fingers without raising his hand off the bed.

You already did. I blinked back that thought—and every single memory that wanted to come. Kaylie, at five, sitting on a fence, wearing a bathing suit and a feather boa. At seven, walking on her hands. At seventeen, throwing an arm around my shoulder.

Toby Hawthorne had already stolen the world from me, but that didn’t stop him from continuing. “So now would be a good time,” he said, every inch the billionaire’s son, “for someone to tell me what the hell is going on here.”

In that moment, I came to a decision: I didn’t want to think of him as Toby Hawthorne anymore. He could be Harry, for all I cared. He could be no one, as long as I could find a way to look at him without thinking about what I had lost.

“What happened was that an explosion threw you off a cliff into the ocean.” I kept my tone detached. “Too Much Beard over there pulled you out of the water, and right now, the two of us are all you’ve got. So shut the hell up”—I reached for a bottle of pain medication—“and take these.”

Dark green eyes opened wider once more and locked on the little white pills in my hand.

“Don’t mind if I do.” His lips curved slightly. “I think I might be fond of pills. But these…” He turned his head slowly to look at the bottle. “These, I seem to find disappointing.”

I bet you do. My eyes narrowed to slits as I thought about the kind of drugs this rich boy was probably used to taking.

“Do no harm,” I muttered to myself between clenched teeth. I brought the meds to his mouth. There was something that felt intentional about the way his lips brushed my palm as I fed them to him.

I wasn’t particularly gentle as I poured water down his throat. “Word to the wise, Harry,” I told him, my voice as close to emotionless as I could make it. “You might want to get used to being disappointed.”