Chapter 32

My legs weren’t entangled with Harry’s, the way they had been in my dream. I was lying on my side, and he was on his, my body curled slightly inward and his curved around it. My head was nestled against the spot where his shoulder met his chest.

I wondered if I was hurting him, and the sense of déjà vu that hit me then was almost as palpable as my memory of Kaylie dancing. No regrets.

Light seeped through the cracks in the lighthouse walls. It was morning. I extracted myself as carefully as I could from the arms wrapped around me.

This was real. This wasn’t a dream. I grounded myself in that knowledge, in the sound of Harry’s breath and the lingering feel of his warmth on my skin, and then I left in absolute silence and stepped outside to a morning utterly devoid of wind.

I walked to stand exactly where I had in my dream, but my sister never came. Ghosts weren’t real. Dreams weren’t, either. But the specter my mind had conjured up—it had felt like Kaylie, felt so much like her that the promise she’d forced out of me felt real.

No regrets. Those two words summarized my sister better than any others possibly could. If she’d been more capable of regret, maybe she would have been more capable of caution, of holding grudges, of looking backward or forward or anywhere but the now.

Promise me… I could hear her in my mind, and even though my instinct was to bow my head the second my eyes started to sting, I bent my neck backward instead, tilting my face up to the morning sky. Don’t stop. Living. Loving. Dancing.

My breathing went ragged as tears began to slowly carve their way down my face, one after another. And then I heard the sound of footsteps behind me.

I turned to find him walking slowly toward me.

“Are you trying to kill me, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward?”

I thought at first that Harry was referring to what had passed between us the night before, but then he brought his hand to my face and wiped a tear away with his thumb.

“I take back what I said before about you being an ugly crier,” he murmured. My body, traitor that it was, listed toward his. “You’re a hideous crier.” His lips slanted upward on one side. “A blight on my tender eyes.”

“Nothing about you is tender,” I said.

“Liar.” Harry let that word hang in the air for a moment. “If this”—the pad of his thumb slowly rid my face of another tear—“is about me…”

“It’s not,” I said.

Harry took me at my word. “In that case, and assuming you don’t want to talk about it…”

“Good assumption.”

“Care to tell me how horrible I am again?” He arched a brow. That was clearly an invitation. In the light of day, I wasn’t quite so desperate for the touch of another human being. I didn’t need him, the way I had before.

I needed to dance. Every day. I needed to feel—the way Kaylie had always felt everything. She’d spent a lifetime trying to drag me into the sun, into trouble—and there trouble was, standing far too close to me.

I knew exactly what my sister would have told me to do.

“I would love to outline your flaws,” I told Harry, emphasizing each and every word. “In detail.”

Something flashed in his eyes, white-hot and hard to describe.

“But,” I continued, “I have to go to work, and you have to make it back to the shack—without stumbling this time, even once.”

“Always the taskmaster,” Harry drawled.

I inhaled, then exhaled, then inhaled again. “No regrets.”