Chapter 24

That night, in my own bed, I tried to read—a retelling of Beauty and the Beast.

A mansion of marvels. A stolen clockwork rose. A curse. But it was the beast himself that kept me from reading past the first hundred pages. His habit of brutally shoving people away. His arrogance, as enduring as his curse. The fact that he knew what he was, knew that loving him might destroy her if, by some miracle, she was the one.

As I closed the book, a little harder than necessary, I could practically hear Harry talking about my sugar packet castles. Do you believe in fairy tales, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward?

I really, truly didn’t. I laid back and closed my eyes, willing sleep to come, but my stubborn eyelids crept back open. Damn it. I looked at my hand.

I started where Harry had—with the W.

“W, Y, I, E, H…” I said under my breath. Phonetically, if I tried to pronounce that as a single word, it sounded a bit like why? Next was noc, then nuh.

In other words: a whole lot of nothing. Looking at all the letters, I wondered if there were any palindromes buried somewhere in the sequence. There were three N’s, three H’s, two E’s, two each of U, W, and Y.

Nun. Ewe. Eye. I really, really hated the fact that I could so vividly picture the way Harry’s lips looked when he smirked. No. I wasn’t going to waste another minute on this little game of his.

Not one.

And yet, at the hospital the next day, when the pen marks on the back of my hand began to rub off under the force of repeated hand washings, I used my break to redraw the circle and letters myself.

W, Y, I, E, H, N, O, C… I was vaguely annoyed by the fact that I had the entire sequence memorized—but not as annoyed as I was by the fact that I still couldn’t solve it.

“Do you want a hint?”

I glared at Harry and his smug Harry face.

“I’ll take that as a no, then.” He winked at me as I finished rebandaging his chest. “I do hope you appreciate how magnanimous I’m being by not gloating right now.”

“You are gloating.” It always took me a moment, after I’d dressed his remaining burns, to stop thinking about the places on his chest and torso where smooth skin gave way to what I knew would someday be very heavy scars. There were days when I felt like I had scarred him.

I’d given him more than he ever would have had any right to ask me of me, and it wasn’t enough.

“I am gloating in an understated manner. I assure you that, were I not, my method of gloating would be far more memorable.”

I responded with a very sweet smile, which he rightly found concerning.

“Should I even ask what torture you have planned for me today?” he said dryly.

Today was my day off. “Today,” I told him, “we work on uneven ground.”

“Dare I hope that’s a metaphor?”

“For what?” I gave him a look. “On second thought: Don’t answer that. Today, we go outside.”

“In the light of day?” Harry’s arch question set my heart to beating in my throat. For so long, his world—our world—had been this shack. Going outside, where we could be seen, was a risk—but a necessary one.

“No one comes out this far,” I told myself as much as him. I walked to open the metal door—first a crack to verify, then wider to prove my point. The only thing I could see was the lighthouse a hundred yards away. Nothing—and no one—else.

It took some time for Harry to make it to the threshold of the shack, but his movements were smooth. I stepped out onto rocky ground. He did the same—or tried to. If I hadn’t moved in to brace his body against mine, he would have fallen. It wasn’t until his fingers dug into my arm—hard—that I realized: He was blinded by the sun.

No windows, I thought suddenly. It had been easy for me to forget that Jackson’s shack didn’t have windows. I wasn’t living there, and unless it was one of my days off, I arrived and left under cover of night.

For a month and a half, Toby Hawthorne had lived with only artificial light. I should have taken him outside sooner. I dismissed that thought because what I should have done, right from the beginning, was stay as far away from him as I could.

“What a scenic view.” Harry—he had to stay Harry in my mind—said, still blinking. “I, for one, have always been partial to crumbling lighthouses.”

I was on the verge of meeting his sarcasm with sarcasm of my own when he continued. “Call me sentimental, but there’s something beautiful about anything built for one purpose that refuses to die, even once that purpose is gone.”

I didn’t know what it was that possessed me in that moment, but suddenly, I had to ask, the same way I had to breathe. “Have you remembered anything about your life before?”

Harry took a step forward, rock to rock, his jaw clenched with the effort. The sun reflected off his dark brown hair, deep red highlights shimmering in the light. “The first thing I remember, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward, is you.”