Chapter 37

I’d only been back to my apartment once since I stopped going into work, for clothes. If I’d been thinking straight, I would have packed up everything I needed then, but I hadn’t.

Hadn’t been thinking straight.

Hadn’t packed.

I let myself in and got straight to work. Fifteen minutes later, I was almost done. Sixteen minutes in, my front door opened, even though I’d locked it behind me.

“Look what the tide dragged in.” Rory took up nearly the entire doorframe, and I was smart enough to know that was intentional. He wanted me to be keenly, viscerally aware of the difference in our sizes.

He wanted me thinking about the fact that my exit was blocked.

“I don’t know what you mean.” Neutral tone, neutral expression—old habits kicked back in fast.

“Don’t you, Hannah?” Rory’s smile was the furthest thing from comforting. “I’m surprised. Eden’s always saying you’re so smart.”

I thought about the way I’d shown my cousin up that night, when my mother had dragged him here to teach him a lesson. Rory hadn’t known that he’d gotten into a fight with a Hawthorne. I’d figured it out.

I told myself that was all this was. I told myself that he didn’t know. He couldn’t.

If he’d known what I’d really been up to these past few months, I probably would have been bleeding by now.

“What do you want, Rory?” I said flatly.

“We all thought you skipped town.” He stared at me for a moment, then his expression turned self-congratulatory. “I had someone keeping an eye on this place, just in case.”

“That’s not an answer to my question,” I pointed out. My voice was calm, but on the inside, I was saying every prayer I knew that whoever my cousin had paid to tell him if I came back to my apartment hadn’t realized what direction I’d come from.

Where I’d been.

“What makes you think I’m here to answer your questions?” Rory’s beady eyes narrowed. “Where have you been, Hannah?”

I channeled my inner Jackson: “None of your business.”

“That’s what you’ve never understood.” My cousin pointed a finger at me. “Our family is business. Business is family.” He nodded toward the bag in my hand. “Looks like you’re running away. I have to ask myself why—and what you might know.”

That tipped me off to the fact that he was here on his own behalf, not my mother’s. Maybe he suspected there was something off with her.

Maybe he thought I’d disappeared because I knew what it was.

“You know, Rory,” I said slowly, “you should ask yourself if my mother would want you here.” I nodded toward the scar along his cheekbone. “It’s healed up nicely, by the way.”

“You’re up to something,” he spat.

That’s an understatement. “Look on the bright side,” I told him. “Once I’m gone, she’s going to need an heir.”

“It was never going to be you.” His lip curled. “Or Kaylie.”

“Don’t you say her name,” I said, my voice low.

Rory shook his head, his eyes narrowed. “Who do you think watched over her after you left, huh?”

That was the only kind of blow he felt confident issuing. He doesn’t know a damn thing, and he’s not suicidal enough to lay a finger on me without permission.

All I had to do was to buy myself some time. I just needed him to leave, so I could do the same. Permanently. Considering my options, I let my control falter visibly, let him take that as a victory.

“I don’t want to fight with you, Rory.” My voice was mostly steady, but it was higher now. “I’m messed up, okay? Is that what you want to hear?”

It was exactly what he wanted to hear, so I gave him more.

“I am in pieces,” I said. “I am nothing. And all I want is to disappear.”

I wasn’t in pieces. I wasn’t nothing. And there was something I wanted much more than to disappear—something impossible, something real. But he didn’t know that.

If I played this right, none of them would ever know that.

“Why do you care if I leave town?” I continued brokenly. “I was never really one of you. I don’t know anything. I’m not a threat to anyone.” I told him the kind of lie he was wired to believe: “I’m just a girl.”

Rory looked down at me as he stepped from the doorway. “Not so smart now, are you, Hannah?”

I let him have the last word.

Once he was gone—once I’d verified that he was gone—I took my lone bag and got in my car, and I drove. Going straight back to Jackson’s wasn’t an option, not anymore. I hadn’t wanted to risk stashing my car anywhere before, but that choice had been made for me now. I couldn’t go to Jackson’s from Rockaway Watch.

I’d have to take the back way in.

So I drove—out of town, onto the highway. I kept driving until I was sure no one had followed.

And then, I had to get back.

It was dark—and then some—when I knocked on the metal door of the shack. I’d walked miles, taken multiple buses, walked miles more. And still, my body was flooded with adrenaline. Harry and I—we had to get out of here.

Tonight.

“What do you want?” Jackson practically snarled his customary greeting.

“It’s me,” I answered.

A long time passed before he opened the door. When he did, I looked automatically past him—but Harry wasn’t there.

My heart leapt into my throat.

“He’s waiting for you,” Jackson said, putting me out of my misery. “At the lighthouse.” The fisherman must have gotten a better look at me then, because his eyes narrowed. “What the hell happened to you?”

“Harry has to go,” I said. “Tonight. My cousin Rory is sniffing around. He doesn’t know anything—yet—and I’m certain I wasn’t followed here, but—”

Jackson cut me off: “I don’t need to know.”

I stared at him for a moment longer, this man who had pulled a dying boy from the ocean and given him to me. And then, wordlessly, I turned and made my way across the rocks to the lighthouse.

To Harry.

My body knew the path by heart. I could have hiked the rocky trail in my sleep, but I was beyond awake—heart-pounding, breath-a-little-shallow, body-on-high-alert, might-never-sleep-again awake.

I opened the lighthouse door expecting it to be dark inside and was greeted with light. Candles, at least a dozen of them, had been scattered around the perimeter of the room. I had no idea where Harry had even gotten them.

In the middle of the floor, there was a light-blue blanket. Harry was sprawled out on it, waiting for me. In front of him, there was checkerboard—but not just a checkerboard. It looked like he’d cut out the individual squares with one of Jackson’s knives and rebuilt it from scratch. Some marvel of ingenuity and engineering made it look like most of those squares were hovering midair.

“Three-dimensional checkers.” Coming from Harry, that was equal parts invitation and challenge.

I stood for a moment in the doorway, taking in the candles and the blanket and the game, and something in me broke a little. “We have to go.” My voice came out hoarse. “Tonight.” I closed my eyes, a phantom hand locking around my heart. “Now.”

I heard Harry get up. I heard him coming closer. The Close Your Eyes Game. I felt each and every step he took.

“We don’t have to do anything.” His voice started soft, then grew in strength and volume, in intensity. “I don’t need anything, Hannah, except this.”

His voice surrounded me. He was right in front of me now, and I couldn’t bear to open my eyes.

“Except you,” he whispered.

I couldn’t keep my eyes closed any longer, and when I opened them, dark green eyes, shining with the light of bad ideas and worse ones, met mine.

“If who I am is a problem, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward, then to hell with who I am.” His voice was everywhere. He was everywhere I looked, and I could tell: He meant it. “I don’t care about who I was before. I don’t care about that life. I care about this one, about you. We can stay here or we can go, we can run or we can hide, but anything I do—I am doing it with you.”

A breath caught in my throat, and I forced myself to keep breathing, the way he always had, through the pain. “You don’t understand,” I said. “You don’t know what you would be giving up.”

From the very beginning, I’d known that someday he would go back to being Tobias Hawthorne the Second, the only son of a billionaire, with the world at the tips of his fingers. I had assumed from the beginning that someday he would find out about Hawthorne Island, about Kaylie, about all of it.

But what if he didn’t have to?

He’d been running from something. What if he didn’t go back? What if he stayed Harry and Toby Hawthorne stayed dead?

What if, this time, we ran together?

“I know what I won’t give up, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward.” Harry’s hands made their way to my face. “I won’t give up the person I am with you. For you. This…” His fingers explored the contours of my jaw, my cheekbones, my temples, like he was attempting to see me with all of his senses at the same time. “This is real. My life before can stay a bad dream, and you can tell me, Hannah, O Hannah—who made you look like this?”

Hannah, O Hannah. Another palindrome. I might have responded to that, if it wasn’t for his question. Who made you look like this?

I’d almost forgotten about Rory, about the reason that tonight was it, the reason we had to go. Now.

“One of my cousins.” I wasn’t going to lie to him—not about this, not when I was considering spending the rest of my life lying to him by omission so we could live a fairy tale. Together.

“Did he threaten you?” Harry clipped the words, and the lines of his face hardened. “Touch you? I’ll kill him.”

“No.” That was the last thing we needed. “You won’t. We’re running.”

“We,” Harry repeated, and just like that, with one word, my decision was made.

“We’ll start over,” I whispered, “far, far away.”

That had always been a part of my plan—leaving this world behind, leaving my family behind. And from the time I was a child, I’d never planned on going alone.

“Far, far away,” Harry repeated. He pulled me toward him, his lips coming down on mine little by little by little. “Once upon a time…”

I kissed him back, kissed him like we were caught in the rain, like we were standing at the edge of the Eiffel Tower, like I’d just found him in the dark, like if I kissed him hard enough and long enough, nothing in this world would exist except the two of us.

Once upon a time… far, far away…

“Sagas,” I whispered, kissing the exact spot on his neck where I could feel his pulse. “Level. Aha.” Palindromes.

He grinned and pushed me lightly back against the lighthouse wall, pulling off his own shirt and offering up an aching, whispered palindrome of his own. “Wow.”

I’d hated him until I’d loved him, and now, I would love him until the end.

“Once upon a time…” I whispered, trailing kisses down his jaw, his neck, along his collarbone, and down to his scars. “There was a girl…”

“And a boy…” he murmured into my skin. “And pain and wonder and darkness and light and this.”

Once upon a time, I thought, there was us.

The next thing I knew, neither one of us was standing up. He was on the ground, and I was on top of him.

Three seconds later, we’d knocked over a candle.

The floor of the lighthouse was made of old, rotting wood. The flame caught, spreading from board to board. Beneath me, Harry froze, his limbs motionless, his chest still, like he wasn’t even breathing. I snapped out of it first and moved—fast. I grabbed the blanket, threw it on top of the flames, stamped on it.

Even once the fire was out, Harry remained motionless.

The smell of smoke was unmistakable. I knelt, reaching for him. “Harry?”

After a long moment, he took my hand in his. He held it tightly for a second or two, and then, as he closed his eyes, he placed my hand gently on the floor beside him. He let go.

“Harry—”

“That isn’t my name.” His voice sounded the same. The ache in it, the darkness, the emotion rising up like stormwater behind a dam—it was all familiar, but still, I knew.

The fire. The flames. He remembered. I wasn’t sure how much. An instant later, he was on his feet, prowling the room from candle to candle. He snuffed one flame out, then another, pinching the candles’ wicks between his forefinger and his thumb.

He was going to burn himself.

“Stop.” I caught him before he could make it to the last candle. He broke out of my grip, and this time, when he snuffed the flame out, he did it slow, like he wanted it to hurt.

“Stop,” I said hoarsely. I hadn’t healed his burns for him to scorch himself now.

With the last flame extinguished, Harry let his hand drop to his side. I let myself think of him that way, as Harry, one last time, even though I knew: He wasn’t Harry anymore.

“I never did know how to stop.” Toby Hawthorne said those words in an unnaturally calm voice. Not even half a second later, he drove his fist into the wall. I heard the impact of his knuckles against the stone, heard the wall of the lighthouse creak, like it might come down around us.

“Stop,” I said again, my voice quiet and just as calm as his. “Toby.” That was the first time—ever—that I’d used his real name out loud. “Stop.”

He looked at me like I was an angel—and not the sweet kind with clouds and a harp but the terrifying kind, otherworldly and too bright to behold.

He looked at me like I was his world—and like that world was ending.

“You knew.” He stared at me, the muscles in his throat visibly taut. “You know.”

“You need to breathe,” I told him.

“Kaylie.” He said her name, and then he said it again and again and again. “Kaylie. Your Kaylie. I killed her, Hannah. I killed all of them. The fire—I was so damn angry, and at first, it was just supposed to be the dock. But I hated my father so much, hated everyone so much, it didn’t seem like enough. And when Colin suggested we go for the house—”

He didn’t finish. When I tried to reach for him, he tore himself away from me like my touch scalded his skin more than any flame could have. He stumbled out of the building, into the night, gaining traction and speed as he went. I ran after him as he ran for the lighthouse point.

I saw then what he intended. He was going to hurl himself off the point—into the water, into the rocks. Adrenaline flooded my veins, and I made it to him before he could do a damn thing. I latched my arms around him, holding him back with everything I had.

He fought me. Toby Hawthorne fought to die, and I fought back harder. In the end, I won, because he wouldn’t hurt me, and I had no such compunctions.

If I had to hurt him to save him, then that was too damn bad.

“You told me…” He was wheezing now, like he was right back in the fire on Hawthorne Island. “You told me I didn’t get to die.”

“You don’t.” I caught his head in my hands and forced his eyes to mine. “Not now, not ever until you’re old and gray. Do you hear me, Toby Hawthorne?” I said his full name like he’d been Toby to me this whole time, because suddenly, it didn’t matter—Harry. Toby. He was the same.

He was mine.

“You don’t get die on me,” I said, my voice low and fierce. “You don’t get to make me love you and then destroy yourself.”

He looked me right in the eyes. “You don’t love me. You can’t. I killed her.”

“It was an accident.” I’d never said those words before. He shook his head, and I said them again. “It was an accident, Toby.”

“You hated me.” He understood now, so many things he hadn’t before, and I heard it in his voice: If it wasn’t this cliff, it would be another.

“I hated you until I loved you,” I said. “And I’ll love you until the end.”

This wasn’t the end. I wouldn’t let it be the end of him or me or us.

“So whatever you’re thinking right now,” I told him ferociously, my voice shaking, my body threatening to do the same, “get it out of your mind. I have lost enough, Toby. I am not going to lose you, too. Do you understand me?”

Did he? Did he understand that I didn’t know how to breathe without him anymore? I’d spent weeks knowing that I was going to lose him—but not like this, not when we’d been so close to everything.

Once upon a time…

Far, far away…

“Promise me.” I did to him what Kaylie had done to me in my dream, because what choice did he have except to make this promise? I’d lived with the reality of his role in my sister’s death for months, but it was brand-new to him.

There was nothing he would deny me right now.

“Promise me,” I said again, “that you will live.” Promise me, you bastard.

He promised.