Chapter 38

We didn’t leave that night, the way I’d intended for us to, the way we needed to. Instead, Harry walked wordlessly back to Jackson’s shack. Jackson was gone when we got there. I wondered where he was. I wondered if he’d heard us.

We’d been shouting, Toby and me. There’d been wind.

“If you want to go back,” I said, once Toby and I were inside the shack, alone, “now that you know who you are, if you want to stop running—I understand.”

“Is that what you think this is?” Toby stopped right next to the loose floorboard, the one we’d avoided in all those rounds of The Boards On The Floor Game. “You think,” he continued tersely, “that now that I know who I am, who my father is, I want to go back?”

“I don’t know,” I whispered.

Toby looked at me like looking at me hurt. “I meant what I said before, Hannah, O Hannah. Every word of it. This—you, me—it’s the only thing that’s real. It is the only thing that matters to me. If I could snap my fingers and make my last name anything other than Hawthorne, I would.” He closed his eyes. “If I could take it all back—”

The fire. Kaylie. All of it.

“I’m a murderer.”

“You’re not,” I insisted, closing the space between us. “You didn’t start the fire. You never lit a single match. None of you did. And Toby? I don’t think you would have, not unless you knew for a fact that everyone was clear of the flames.”

Kerosene. Lightning. A tragedy in two words.

“I’m the reason your sister is dead, Hannah. She’s your lost one, and I’m the reason you lost her.” He was almost shaking now. “I have to turn myself in.”

I swore at him, every single curse word I knew. “They’ll kill you. Do you understand that? My family will kill you, and you promised me that you would live.”

I grabbed him by the shoulders, trying to make him look at me, but he closed his eyes, and when he finally opened them again, he fell to his knees in front of me, his head bowed.

Toby Hawthorne knelt at my feet, like a sinner in confession. He stayed there, his body shuddering, refusing to let me touch him, and then he lifted the loose floorboard. He reached into the hole and locked his hand around the metal token.

“The tree is poison, don’t you see?” he said, his voice hoarse. “It poisoned S and Z and me.” He looked up at me, tears in his eyes. “I remember. All of it. The whole, sordid truth.”

The story of his life came in bits and pieces through the night. He forced himself to tell me, to relive it, a form of penance that I hadn’t asked for. But I listened, recasting his story as a fairy tale in my mind, the way he once had mine.

The prince had discovered that he was adopted when he was fourteen. His father’s subjects didn’t know. His sisters, the princesses, didn’t know. His mother, the queen, had faked a pregnancy, and even once he’d discovered that much, the young prince hadn’t realized why—not at first. He’d spent years wondering why the brilliant king and the sparkling, joyful queen had gone to such lengths to hide the truth about their only son.

And then, one day, the prince had found the corpse.

I tried to imagine what it had been like for Toby to see human remains and to realize, as he had eventually realized, that it had once been his biological father, a man named William Blake.

William Blake. I had no idea how a nineteen-year-old had even pieced it all together. He didn’t say. And the entire time, as the boy I loved laid himself bare to me, I just kept thinking the words he’d once said: Sometimes, when I look at you, I feel you, like a hum in my bones, whispering that we are the same.

My mother was a murderer, too.

The metal token—the one he’d reacted so violently toward—had belonged to William Blake, and, along with Blake’s remains, it served as proof of Toby’s biological father’s death at his adoptive father’s hands. It was proof of Toby’s identity as the grandson of another very powerful—and even more dangerous—man.

Another king…

He told me every last detail about his grand good-bye to the life he’d lived before: moving his father’s remains, fleeing the palatial Texas estate where he’d been raised, leaving messages—more than one, encrypted of course—to make it clear exactly what he knew. Spiraling, he’d partied his way across the country and ended up here.

The one thing he didn’t seem to remember was meeting me in the bar.

“The kerosene—it wasn’t my idea.” He closed his eyes when he said that. We were lying on the floor of the shack now, and I laid on his ruined chest, where I could hear his heartbeat and know that he was still there, that he was alive.

He’d promised me that he would stay that way, no matter what.

“It wasn’t my idea, but I agreed, because I’m poison.” He made an attempt to roll out from underneath me, but I didn’t let him. “No matter who gave birth to me or what blood runs in my veins, I’m a Hawthorne, everything my father raised me to be. I won’t poison you, too, Hannah. You deserve—”

“You,” I bit out. I pushed myself up into a sitting position and locked my eyes on to his. “I deserve you. I deserve to be happy, and you make me happy, you impossible, arrogant, self-destructive, infuriating, brilliant, wonderful son of a bitch.”

He lifted his hand to my face, and in my mind, I could see the way he’d drawn me, could hear him murmuring, There you are.

“If I know one thing about my sister,” I continued fiercely, “it’s that Kaylie would want me to be happy, too.” I wasn’t going to avoid saying her name. He needed to know that I didn’t have to pretend my sister away to look at him, to see him, to want him.

Anything is possible when you love someone with no regrets.

“I liked her.” Toby breathed—in and out, and I tried to do for him what I’d done so many times, back when I’d hated him and he was half out of his mind with pain. I held his gaze, breathing through it with him.

“Your sister was worth ten of me and my friends,” he said quietly, “and she knew it.”

My throat tightened. My eyes stung. I laid my head back down on his chest, a physical, tangible sign to him that he wasn’t going anywhere, and I told him about the dream. “No regrets,” I reiterated when I was done. “She made me promise.”

“God, Hannah, I’m so—”

“Don’t tell me you’re sorry.” I put my hand to his mouth. Words could never be enough, but he was. We were. “I don’t want you to be sorry.”

I wanted him to be mine.

He kissed me—just once, lightly, a ghost of a kiss, before we fell asleep. It wasn’t until I woke up the next morning and found a letter where he should been that I realized…

That kiss had been good-bye.