Chapter 33

I made it through my entire shift without seeing my mother. I wondered if she’d checked out—and if so, if she’d done it against medical advice. I wondered what her prognosis was.

I wondered how much time I’d bought myself.

And I decided: The day I got Toby Hawthorne out of Rockaway Watch, I was leaving, too—not with him. I hadn’t completely lost my senses, and I wasn’t that naive. The second Harry found out who he really was, the second I tipped his billionaire father’s men off about his location, he would be gone.

The two of us would, in all likelihood, never see each other again. He would go on his way, and I would go on mine.

Soon—but not yet. He wasn’t ready yet. We had time.

I came back to the shack under the cover of darkness that night knowing that I had the next two days off, knowing that I wasn’t going to leave until I had to.

“We’re going back to the lighthouse.” That was the way I greeted Harry the moment he opened the metal door. This time, I could see Jackson seated at the table in the background, but the fisherman didn’t say a word to either of us.

“Your wish is my command,” Harry drawled, stepping out into the night.

I’d made sure I wasn’t followed on the way here. I’d scanned the surrounding area. We were alone.

“Anyone who knows anything about fairy tales,” I said, “knows not to trust a statement like that.”

Harry walked past me, over rocky ground, and this time, he didn’t stumble. Something about the way he moved told me he was still in pain, but that pain didn’t matter—not to him.

“It’s a good thing,” he called back to me, “that I’ve never pretended to be trustworthy.”

The first time a person made a mistake, it could be just that: a mistake, a one-off, a blip. The second time, it was a pattern. It was intentional.

It was devastating in the best possible way.

Still a mistake. I knew that, and I had no excuses. I couldn’t pin this on a dream. This was me. This was what happened when I let someone see me, when I let myself imagine what it would be like not to be alone.

I never decided to let him in. I just stopped lying to myself, and there he was—past my shields, under my skin, this horrible boy, this person I’d hated and hated and hated and somehow didn’t hate anymore.

On our second night at the lighthouse, I slept without dreaming, my body tangled with his, and I woke up alone.

He was gone. What if he took off? My entire body seized with that thought. He’d been strong enough to get to the lighthouse. What if he’d thought he was strong enough to go farther? What if he’s done—with this, with me, with waiting for his escape?

What if he’d gone into town?

I burst out of the lighthouse into the night—and then I saw him.

Past the jut of land on which the lighthouse stood, down below, there was a small bit of beach. Harry must have climbed down—reckless—to reach it. I could make out his silhouette in the moonlight.

He was on his knees, drawing something in the sand.

Someone could see you, I thought. See us, I corrected myself, as I looked for a path to join him. I knew that the risk was probably small. It was the middle of the night. From a distance, he wouldn’t have been visible, even with the moonlight.

I wasn’t sure that I would have seen him, if he’d been anyone else.

Drawing closer, I realized that Harry wasn’t drawing on the sand. He was writing—letters. Large ones. An entire alphabet’s worth.

That was when I remembered: I’d won our game of hangman, but I’d never broken his code. You could start by writing out the letters of the alphabet. That had been his smug little hint. See if anything jumps out to you.

He spotted me as he was finishing the Y. “You thought I left, didn’t you, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward?”

The waves crashed behind us and rolled up onto the beach, stopping maybe five feet from where he was writing, a natural soundtrack with valleys and peaks.

“Leaving the wrong way could get you killed,” I said as he drew the Z with a flourish. Another wave crashed behind us. “It could get me killed, too.”

It was the first time I’d ever put that thought into words: If the world found out what I’d done, if my family did, if letting me live would be read by others as a sign of weakness…

“Tell me.” Harry stood.

I looked down at his alphabet—what I could see of it in the moonlight. “The answer or the truth?” I asked. The code—or why we have to be so careful?

“Dealer’s choice.”

I knelt in the sand, getting a better look at the letters he’d written, attending to them one by one. There was nothing remarkable about the Z, the Y, the X, the W…

“People who cross my family end up dead.” I kept my explanation short and to the point.

“Drugs?” Harry saw the answer to that on my face, even with nothing but the moon for light. “But with me…” Harry took his time with the next bit. “It’s not business. It’s personal.”

He was getting too close to something I wasn’t sure either one of us could handle.

“That wasn’t a question,” I noted.

“Games are easier than questions for me. Puzzles. Riddles. Codes.” Harry looked down at the alphabet he’d drawn in the sand. “My memory is a blank slate, but there are a surprising number of things I haven’t forgotten. I know how to tie my shoes. I know how to breathe through pain and wrap it in an imaginary iron box in my mind. And I know that there wasn’t anyone who could solve this before you.”

I wasn’t sure, when he said this, if he was talking about the code—or himself. All I knew for certain was that the way he said the words before you made me think about him—his breath on my skin, my breath on his.

Once upon a time, hating him had been the easiest thing in the world.

“The way you wrote the letters is boxy and angled.” I moved my way down the beach, bringing my fingers to touch the U, then the S.

“Drawn only with straight lines,” I continued, “just like they were in Two Moves.”

“And what does that tell you?” Harry challenged.

“It’s all connected.” My answer was automatic, and so was the way that I started drawing in the sand. He’d taken up most of the dry canvas, so I went to where the sand was barely damp and dragged my finger through its surface, writing out the code from our game of hangman by memory.

My lips starting to curve, I wrote the answer above the numbers—UNCOPYRIGHTABLE—and then I turned my attention back to Harry’s alphabet, walking down the beach, all the way to the start.

To the letter A.

I wrote a 3 next to it—the correct digit, based on the code. “A lot of the numbers in the code start with a three,” I noted out loud. I looked back toward the encrypted string of numbers and the word I’d written on top of them. “Only two of them start with a two.”

L and T.

“You see it, don’t you?” Harry asked.

I scowled at him. “B shouldn’t be seven.”

He shrugged. “Depends on how you draw it.” I looked back to his B. He’d drawn it with no angles, only parallel and perpendicular lines.

Seven lines. “A is three—it takes three lines to make the letter. B, the absurd way you’ve drawn it, takes seven. If you’d used angled lines, the way you did for the R in our last game, it only would have taken five.”

“Six if you break the long line into two smaller ones.” Harry had absolutely no remorse for playing dirty. “I warned you before: I learned to skew games in my favor from the master.”

That wasn’t what he’d said before, not exactly. My gut said that, whether he knew it or not, he was talking about his father. The billionaire. A person didn’t amass a fortune like that without skewing the game.

“Do you know,” I asked Harry quietly, “who you’re talking about?”

I saw a muscle ripple over his jaw, and for the longest time, he said nothing.

“Your mother never hurt you.” When Harry finally did speak, his voice was perfectly even, perfectly calm, and far too much like my own. “She never had to. That’s what you said last night.”

His reply had been that he thought he might know what that was like.

“When I was nine…” I swallowed and fixed my gaze in the direction of the seemingly endless ocean, dark as the night. “I heard her throw a man to the dogs. They were starving, and he was bleeding. That was the day I realized she kept them hungry and mean for a reason.”

I was fairly certain my mother hadn’t realized that I was at home that night. I’d always been grateful that Kaylie hadn’t been.

“You were right before,” Harry said suddenly, “when you called me a coward.”

I wondered what slivers of memory, what secrets my own had shaken loose in his head.

“I know I was running,” he told me, his voice low. “I just don’t know from what—or who.” His eyes opened and found their way to mine. “I’m coming around to your perspective on hiding. It’s not so bad, being hidden.” He took a step toward me, into damp sand. “I don’t mind being someone’s dirty little secret, as long as it’s yours.”

For the longest time, neither of us said another word, and then I turned back to the letters in the sand, the ones he’d written. Next to the A, I’d already written a 3. Next to the B, I wrote a 7. A C, when drawn with only straight lines, required three lines, and in the code, the letter C had corresponded to the number thirty-two.

I wrote that in the sand. “Thirty-two,” I said. “As in, three dash two. It’s the second letter written with three lines.”

“There are a lot of letters,” Harry told me, “that can be written with only three lines.”

I’d broken his code. I felt his presence like breath on my skin and wondered if he could feel mine the same way. I wondered what the hell we were doing, what the hell I was doing.

No regrets.

“I read the poem.” I wasn’t even sure where that came from. “The one you quoted to me, weeks ago. ‘A Poison Tree’ by William Blake.”

Harry took a step toward me, then another, leaving him standing maybe a foot away. “Say that again.”

“‘A Poison—’”

“The poet’s name,” he cut in, and the intensity in his voice was like nothing I’d ever heard.

“William Blake,” I said. I stared at him through the dark, wondering what he’d remembered—or what he was on the verge of remembering.

“It’s right there,” Harry said hoarsely. “Just out of reach.”

“What is?”

“Something.” He turned his back on me and started pacing—except pacing wasn’t even the right word. It was closer to prowling. “The tree is poison, don’t you see?” His voice was low, but I heard every word. “It poisoned S and Z and me.”

He was remembering, and it hit me just how badly I didn’t want him to. But I couldn’t hold him back. “What does that mean?” I asked. “The tree is poison…”

“I don’t know.” He gritted out the words.

“S and Z,” I said quietly. “You have sisters.” I’d read that much in those news articles that had been so quick to pin the Hawthorne Island tragedy on my sister. “One named Skye, one named Zara.”

“Did I love them?” Harry asked roughly. “My sisters. Did I love them the way you love Kaylie?”

He said Kaylie’s name like it mattered, like she did. He’d described my love for Kaylie in the present tense, but when he’d asked about his own sisters, he’d used past tense: Did I love them?

Like the person he’d been was already dead and gone.

“I don’t know.” I went with honesty, knowing he would hear it if I didn’t. “They must be missing you, the way I miss Kaylie.”

He angled his eyes sideways toward mine. “Come now, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward, why would anyone miss me?”

My hand caught his as he prowled past. He stilled and looked down at our hands, and then his fingers curved around mine, and he pulled me toward the water.

Sometimes, I could hear him saying, when I look at you, I feel you, like a hum in my bones, whispering that we are the same.

I tried to banish the memory of his voice and ended up hearing another voice in my mind instead. Promise me…

I looked up, my eyes searching the night sky. Overhead, one star glowed brighter than all the rest.

Kaylie.

I’d made her a promise. Whether it had been real or not, I sure as hell wasn’t breaking it. Waves lapped at my feet as I pulled my hand from Harry’s and raised it over my head.

“What are you doing?” He stared at me through the darkness.

“Dancing,” I said, remembering my sister telling me to feel the music.

Harry arched a brow. “You call that dancing?” A slow smile commanded his lips.

The next thing I knew, he was dancing, too. His body knew exactly how to move. I kept dancing, and he danced toward me, until there was no space left between us at all. Damp sand. Night sky. The breeze off the ocean. I felt it all, the same way I felt him. The two of us moved in rhythm with each other for the longest time, and then, without warning, we were kissing in the moonlight, and there was nothing frantic about it this time, nothing angry or brutal. He kissed me like the tide comes in, little by little by little.

No regrets.

“What are we doing?” My lips brushed his with every word.

Harry murmured his answer directly into my skin: “Nothing—or everything.”

For him—and maybe for me—there was nothing in between.