Chapter 30

For as long as I could remember, I’d only ever cried in the shower. The one in my apartment was tiny, but that didn’t stop me from latching my hand around the shower curtain and slamming it back into the wall.

Tears were weak, but crying in the shower didn’t count.

I turned on the spray. Every muscle in my body felt like a rubber band pulled to the breaking point. Not even giving the shower time to warm up, I stepped into the tub.

I shuddered.

I let go.

I’m not crying. When my tears mixed with the spray, I could tell myself they didn’t exist. And why would I have been crying, really? If anyone on this planet deserved cancer, it was my mother. If she died, what was it to me?

Seriously, what was it to me that she’d claimed to miss Kaylie?

What did it matter that I knew my sister had loved her, too?

What did any of it matter?

My breaths were ragged now. But I wasn’t crying, and I refused to hurt. Slowly, my breathing evened out, one thought rising up over all the rest, one thought allowing me to turn off the spray: I have a wager to win tonight.

“You’re late.” Harry was the one who opened the door when I got to the shack. There wasn’t a single light on inside.

“You’re still up,” I said.

“I’m always up.” Harry gave a little shrug. “Sleep is for mortals.” I could feel him peering at me through the darkness. “You’ve been crying.”

The moon was full overhead, but there was still no way he should have been able to tell that.

“You’re delusional,” I replied. “And the answer is uncopyrightable.” It was the longest word in the English language—discounting medical jargon—that contained no repeat letters. That was what I’d looked up on the computer, right before my mother’s appearance at the hospital had shaken me to my core. “Where’s Jackson?” I demanded.

I didn’t want to be alone with Harry right now, and I didn’t even know why—or maybe I did know and didn’t want to admit it.

“Beardy leaves me alone more now, when he thinks I’m sleeping.” Harry imparted that information in a tone I couldn’t quite read.

“I thought sleep was for mortals,” I replied.

I could practically hear him smile that twisted little smile of his. “You got the right answer, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward, but what’s the code?”

I stepped over the threshold and flipped the light on, tired of listening to the sound of his voice through the darkness. “Why does it matter?” I retorted. “I won the wager either way.”

“Haven’t you learned by now?” Harry asked me. “Everything matters—either that, or nothing does.”

There is no in between. I suddenly knew that coming here tonight had been a mistake, just like I knew that I wasn’t leaving.

Harry was wearing an old shirt of Jackson’s that was so ratty and thin I could see the outline of bandages beneath the fabric. I didn’t want to tend to him right now.

I also didn’t want to be alone. Being alone was perhaps my greatest skill in life, and I didn’t want to be alone.

“You asked me about my lost one.” My voice came out hoarse. I needed to talk to someone, and he was there.

He was right there.

“As much as it pains me to admit it, I didn’t win this wager, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward.” In other words: I didn’t have to tell him a damn thing.

“I have a sister.” The words tasted like dust in my mouth—another lie. “I had a sister.”

Seeing my mother had dredged up all the mourning I hadn’t let myself do, all the grief I’d never fully let myself feel. And he was there. Right there.

“I’m sorry.”

I could hear it in his voice: He was. Harry was sorry I was hurting. He was sorry my sister was gone—but he didn’t know that he was the reason why.

“You don’t get to be sorry,” I said fiercely, and then before he could even think about asking me why, I turned back toward the still-open door, toward the full moon outside. “The lighthouse,” I gritted out.

“What about it?” Harry asked, his tone far too gentle for my comfort.

“That’s what I want,” I said, clipping the words. “For winning our wager. We’re going across the rocks to the lighthouse. We’re doing it in under five minutes, and you’re making it all the way there.”

He didn’t respond immediately. “As boons go, this is something of a disappointment.”

“Don’t you remember me telling you that you should get used to being disappointed?” I shot back, stepping out of the shack and down onto the rocks.

“Sounds vaguely familiar,” Harry said. He followed me. I didn’t hold an arm out to help him keep his balance. He could keep his own damn balance. “But, Hannah?”

I was already moving through the moonlit darkness.

“I have never,” Harry said, following in my tracks, pacing me no matter how much pain it caused him, “been disappointed in you.”

I thought about him telling me that first thing he could remember—his beginning—was me. I have never been disappointed in you. What right did he have to say things like that to me, to say anything to me, when he was the reason my world had fallen apart?

What right did I have to listen? To think about that picture he’d drawn of me, when the only thing I should have been thinking about was how much I hated him?

“What was her name?” Harry’s voice was quiet behind me, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I would have been able to hear him from a mile away. We were maybe ten yards into the hike to the lighthouse now, and he hadn’t reached for me once. “Your sister.”

“Kaylie,” I said.

Harry didn’t reply immediately. I wasn’t sure if he was struggling over the rocks or respecting the weight my sister’s name held for me. For the first time since we’d stepped outside, I turned around.

Even in the moonlight, I could see the strain along the muscles of his neck. This wasn’t easy, but he was doing it.

“How did she die?” Harry asked me. His tone was neither harsh nor gentle. It simply was.

You killed her. I turned back toward the lighthouse and kept going, taking my speed up a notch. “You didn’t win our wager,” I said. “I don’t have to answer your questions.”

The next thing I knew, he was beside me, matching my speed, which was the last thing he should have been doing. I need to slow down. It wouldn’t do either of us any good if I injured him further. But somehow, I couldn’t bear to pull back.

And somehow, his own movements a little jagged, he kept up. “Have I ever given you the impression that I actually know how to lose?”

He hadn’t. Of course he hadn’t. He was Toby Hawthorne. But to me, he was Harry, and he was right there, and I didn’t want to be alone.

“You don’t have to tell me a damn thing, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward. But whatever you want to give me, I’ll take.”

I have never been disappointed in you.

Whatever you want to give me, I’ll take.

This was a mistake—coming to see him tonight when I was so raw; dragging him out here; forcing him to push himself this hard. It was all a mistake, one I just couldn’t stop making.

Beside me, Harry stumbled. I caught him. My hands latched on to his arms, just above the elbows. I held him up with strength I hadn’t even realized I had. After a breath or two, he regained his footing, and the tension against my hands subsided, leaving the two of us staring at each other through the moonlight.

Me and the rich boy who’d killed my sister and didn’t even know it.

I felt his gaze like the lightest of touches, like the wind that caught my hair, just like in his sketch.

“You’re an ugly crier,” he told me softly, “for what it’s worth.”

I shook my head at the sheer audacity of him—always. “How’s your pain?” I asked, dropping my hold on him.

“Irrelevant,” he replied. “How’s yours?”

“Can you do this?” I pressed, refusing to tell him a single damn thing about my pain.

Harry smiled a small and crooked smile. “Agony only matters if you let it.” He took a step—and then another.

We hiked in silence, the two of us across those rocks. The silence held until we were well over halfway to the lighthouse. For reasons that I couldn’t even begin to pinpoint, I was the one who broke it. “My mother has cancer. I’m not supposed to know, but I do.”

“I take it you’re also not supposed to care?” His tone made me think of the fairy-tale version he’d spun of my life, the way he’d described me.

“Stop it,” I said. “Stop acting like I’m…” Selfless. Kind. Here tonight for any reason other than a masochistic need to self-destruct.

“Like you’re you?” Harry said, his voice echoing over the rocks toward the ocean.

“You don’t know me,” I told him harshly.

“You don’t believe that.”

The problem was that he was right: I didn’t. “My mother’s a murderer,” I said, hoping to shock him. “Many times over.”

“Has she ever hurt you?” Harry’s voice sounded different: low and almost too controlled. That was the voice of someone who wanted to hurt anyone who’d hurt me.

This is a mistake. Every part of it. Every damn moment. It was a mistake, but we were getting closer and closer to the lighthouse, and there was no turning back. There had been no turning back from the moment he’d opened the door.

“My mother has never laid a hand on me,” I said quietly. “She’s never had to.”

“I think… I think I might know what that’s like.” Beside me, Harry stopped walking. His hair was long enough now to almost fall into his eyes. In moonlight, it looked closer to black than dark reddish-brown. After a long moment, he started moving again, taking one step, then another. I forced myself to walk on, too.

Seventy percent of the way there.

Eighty percent.

“Sometimes, when I look at you,” Harry said, his voice rougher now, as it echoed through the night, “I feel you, like a hum in my bones, whispering that we are the same.”

We’re not. We can’t be. But every puzzle he gave me, I solved. I have to stop. We had to. But damn it all the way to hell—I kept walking.

And so did he. “But then you do something, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward, something selfless, something kind, and I know—I know—that you’re different. Different than me. Different than the whole damn world.”

“Stop talking.” My voice shook. Maybe my body did, too. In the back of my mind, I could hear Harry describing my emotions: It’s like watching stormwater rise and rise behind a dam. “Just stop.”

We were close now—ten yards away, if that.

“I don’t know how to stop,” Harry said quietly. “I’m not sure I ever did.”

I thought about the boy I’d met in the bar. About kerosene. About every single impossible moment with him since.

I hated him.

I did.

But as he reached the lighthouse and slapped a hand against its crumbling stone wall like a swimmer finishing a race, I also believed him: He didn’t know how to stop. He was right there.

And I didn’t want to be alone.

The bane of my existence stared at me through the darkness like it wasn’t dark at all. “I don’t know how to quit this,” he told me. “Quit you.”

What’s there to quit? I thought, but I couldn’t say those words out loud, because I couldn’t stop thinking about bits of folded paper and lemons, about palindromes and puzzles—

“But I’m a selfish bastard, aren’t I? I probably wouldn’t quit you even if I could.”

I placed my hand on the crumbling stone, next to his. “You are a selfish bastard,” I breathed. “And there’s nothing to quit.”

“Liar,” he murmured, and when he brought his hands to my face, when he buried his fingers in my hair, I didn’t fight it.

But not fighting wasn’t enough for him. He brought his lips to just almost touch mine. Almost. And then, damn him to hell and back, he waited.

For me.

Forgive me, Kaylie. I closed the gap. The moment my lips touched his, he shifted his body and mine, and suddenly, my back was up against the lighthouse and nothing else in the world existed except this.

Moonlight and him and this.

I’d never kissed anyone before. Twenty years old, and I’d never even imagined that it could—

“This is a mistake,” I gasped, barely pulling back. “You’re…”

“Horrible,” he filled in, and then his lips crashed down on mine.

Horrible. “Yes,” I said.

“I have no redeeming qualities,” he murmured, as I turned and pressed him back against the lighthouse.

“None,” I said.

His hands still in my hair, he tilted my head back, trailing kisses along my jaw and down my neck. “You hate me.”

I hate you, I thought, my back arching.

I hate you.

I hate you.

I hate you.