Chapter 26

I showed up to Jackson’s the next night with the back of my hand washed clean and the solution to the puzzle, both diagram and words, copied onto a sticky note. I stuck it to Harry’s forehead, dead center.

“And here I’d made a bet with myself that you wouldn’t solve it until tomorrow.” He reached up, pulled the note off his forehead, and folded it in half, not even checking my work.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked him, nodding to the note. “Why hide when you can run.”

“I would think it was obvious.” He got up from the mattress. “You are an expert at hiding.” He cocked his head wolfishly to one side. “Behind your hair. Behind that expression that you keep oh-so-carefully blank. Behind the lies.”

I could feel his gaze trying to capture mine, so I looked away, and it only belatedly occurred to me that I might be proving his point.

“I haven’t lied to you since I told you I was a nurse,” I said.

“You’re a nursing student,” he replied. “An excellent one. And you’ve lied to me many, many times, almost as frequently as you’ve lied to yourself. What I haven’t quite figured out”—if I’d thought Harry’s gaze was wolfish before, it was a thousand times more so now—“is why you try so hard to hide yourself away. I have my theories, of course.”

“It’s not a crime to be reserved.”

“You feel things.” Harry’s voice was softer than it had been a moment before—not gentle, but soft in the way that silk was against skin. “Deeply.” He made a study of my eyes and didn’t bother to mask the fact that he was doing it. “Watching you keep your emotions locked down is like watching stormwater rise and rise behind a dam.”

Everywhere I looked, there he was: dark green eyes, lighter around the rim, so focused on mine that there was no escape.

“You’re grieving,” Harry murmured. “And you’re so angry I can taste it.” He paused, daring me to tell him he was wrong, and when I didn’t, he continued, “You’re frightened—and not just because coming here is dangerous for you.”

I raised my chin and stared him down. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“My life is four walls, this bed, a bearded fisherman with questionable survivalist tendencies and horrific taste in interior design, and you.” He paused, just slightly. “Do you know what I’ve discovered about myself with all that spare time? I’m hungry, Hannah.” For once he used my name. Only my name “My brain drinks in every last detail of its surroundings. Of you.”

I took a step back.

He seemed to take that as an invitation—not to come after me but to tell me exactly what he saw when he drank in every last detail. “You have ways of going elsewhere in your mind. It’s like you’re a dreamer trapped in a cynic’s body, a cynic’s life. Your hands are never still but always steady. And your face—it’s like you have control over every little muscle, even the ones of which most people are completely unaware.”

His weight shifted slightly toward me, and there was something utterly unfamiliar—utterly new—about the set of his lips.

He’s thinking about kissing me. That thought was horrible and unexpected. I told myself that I was imagining things, but… His lips, parting. His eyes on mine. The worst thing was that this time, I didn’t step back.

My heart beat out a steady rhythm, and I felt it in every inch of my body. I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.

“Shall I tell you a story, Hannah?” His words wrapped around me. I became acutely aware of the rise and fall of his chest, of the rise and fall of mine. “A fairy tale? I think I will, and you can tell me how I do. Once upon a time…” Harry took a step back, then another, giving me room to breathe, giving himself room to take in all of me at once. “There was a princess, born to a feckless king and a wicked queen.”

I thought about my father, holding my mother off—to a point and only because he’d lost Kaylie first. But I refused to let my opponent think he’d gotten anywhere close to the truth.

“Name one fairy-tale princess who was actually born to a wicked queen,” I said.

“Hit a nerve, have I?” He flashed me a twisted, knowing smile. “Princess Hannah shined like a beacon in the darkness, nothing like those around her. Selfless. Kind.” There was an edge to the way he said those words, like they weren’t entirely compliments. “But alas, the selfless never fare well in fairy tales until the very end.”

“I’m not selfless,” I shot back. “You said it yourself—I hide.” Making myself invisible for so long had come at a cost. I’d left Kaylie in that house. I’d left her at our mother’s mercy. I’d told myself that I would get her out, but I hadn’t.

And you’re the reason why, I thought, staring bullets at the person telling me the story of my life.

“Not selfless?” Harry said. “You’re here, aren’t you? I am, even by my own reckoning, a real prick, and yet, you come here, day after day. You avert your eyes. You look through me when you can. But you’re here. You saved me.”

“Because you wanted to die.” The words burst out of me.

“It’s possible,” Harry allowed, “that the princess is capable of spite.” He gave the smallest of shrugs. “Her mother is, after all, a wicked queen.”

A muscle in my jaw twitched. “What has Jackson been telling you when I’m not here?”

That was the only explanation for the story my real prick of a patient was spinning, the only way he could have ever seen so much. No one was that perceptive.

“The fisherman hasn’t told me a damn thing. As it turns out, Beardy is impossible to get a rise out of. But you…” He smiled. “You’re like a lock with seven keys, each more complicated than the last.” He gave another little shrug. “I deeply suspect that I’ve always been fond of picking locks.”

“Start moving,” I gritted out, gesturing to the door. “Walk. Use your legs, because we’re getting ready to go out on the rocks.” I was going to get him all the way to the lighthouse this week if it killed me.

“Always the taskmaster, never the pupil.” Harry had the gall to make a tsking sound, then launched back into the fairy tale of my life, as seen through his eyes: “When she was very young, Princess Hannah learned to lock herself away. She had a secret, you see. Magic. And the evil queen would have sucked her dry.”

My throat tightened. He was describing the wrong sister. I wasn’t the one who’d been magic.

“So the princess locked herself away. She built towers, one inside the other inside the other, all of them invisible to everyone but her. Locks and keys. Alone—where no one could harm her, where her magic could be used to do no harm.”

I didn’t have any magic. I was unremarkable. I was nothing.

Why wouldn’t he just let me be nothing?

“Is that the best you can do?” I gritted out, unsure why the words came out hoarse instead of harsh.

Harry started walking toward the door, slow and steady, his eyes never leaving mine. “I see you, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward. All of you.”

This was worse, so much worse than being kissed—because I believed him.

“I see you, too,” I said, my voice like steel, even though my heart was pounding. “I see a scared little boy who runs.”

I was sure now: That was what he’d been doing when he came to Rockaway Watch. I didn’t know exactly why—the poison tree, the metal token—but he had sure as hell been running away from something.

“I see a coward,” I continued mercilessly, “who only fights the battles that don’t matter because facing down the ones that do would be too damn hard.” I pinned him with a look. “Has it ever occurred to you, Harry, that you don’t remember who you are because you don’t want to remember?”

The next thing I knew, he was directly in front of me. “Then tell me. Who am I, Hannah?”

I realized suddenly that this might have been his endgame with this whole conversation. Maybe he’d pushed and pushed and pushed with the sole intention of making me push back.

“In fairy tales,” Harry said, “there’s a power in names.”

He was so close—and I was suddenly certain: He was thinking about kissing me again.

He won’t do it, I told myself. I won’t let him. If he was so damn set on telling stories, I’d tell him one. I would give him exactly what he was asking for. His name. His background. The truth about the fire—and the blood on his hands.

I opened my mouth. The instant I did, he stepped back and sucked in a breath. It was like I’d just taken a knife and sliced open his skin.

The change in him was so sudden and absolute that my mind went immediately to the way he’d reacted when he’d seen the metal token.

“On second thought,” he rasped out, “don’t tell me.”

He was the one who’d opened Pandora’s box here, the one who’d laid me bare. He had pushed and pushed and pushed, and he could damn well deal with the consequences. “Your name is—”

“Please.”

I hadn’t expected that.

This time, he was the one who looked away. “As it turns out, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward, apparently, I’d rather stay Harry to you.”