CHAPTER 74

Alisa didn’t like the idea of my visiting Hawthorne Island. Oren liked it even less. But there was no stopping me now.

“Fine.” Oren gave me a look. “I will arrange security for you.” His eyes narrowed. “And only you.”

Beside me, Xander jumped to his feet. “I object!”

“Overruled.” Oren’s reply was immediate. “We will be flying into a high-threat situation. I want at least an eight-person security team on the ground. We can’t afford a single distraction. Avery is the package—the only package—or I will duct-tape all three of you to chairs and call it a day.”

All three of us. My eyes found their way to Jameson’s. I waited for him to argue with Oren. Jameson Winchester Hawthorne had never sat out a race in his life. He wasn’t capable of it. So why wasn’t he attempting to negotiate with Oren now?

Jameson noticed something about the way I was looking at him. “What?”

“You’re not going to complain about this?” I stared at him.

“Why would I, Heiress?”

Because you play to win. Because Grayson’s already there. Because this was our game—yours and mine—before it was anyone else’s. I tried to stop myself there. Because your brother kissed me. Because when you and I kiss, you feel it, the same way I do.

I wasn’t about to say a single word of that out loud. “Fine.” I kept my eyes on Jameson’s a moment longer, then turned to Oren. “I’ll go alone.”

It took a little under four hours to fly from Texas to the Oregon coast. Including travel time to and from the airport on each side, that was closer to five. I was standing on Jackson Currie’s doorstep—such as it was—by dusk.

“Are you ready?” Grayson asked beside me, his voice low.

I nodded.

“Your men will have to stay back,” Grayson told Oren. “They can set up a perimeter, but I’d bet a very large amount of money that Currie will not open the door if Avery shows up with her own army.”

Oren nodded to his men and made some kind of hand signal, and they spread out. If this went as planned, my mother’s family would never even know I was here. But if they figured it out, small-time criminals didn’t hold a candle to the power of the Hawthornes.

My power, now. I tried to really believe that as I reached forward and knocked on Jackson Currie’s door. My first knock was hesitant, but then I banged with my fist.

“I’m here!” I said. “For real this time.” No response. “My name’s Avery. I’m Hannah’s daughter.” If I had come all this way and he still wouldn’t open the door, I didn’t know what I would do. “Toby wrote my mother postcards.” I kept yelling. “He said that if she ever needed anything, she should come here. I know you saved Toby’s life after the fire. I know my mom helped you. I know that they were in love. I don’t know if her family found out, or what happened exactly—”

The door opened. “That family always finds out,” Jackson Currie grunted. Over the phone, I hadn’t realized just how big he was. He had to have been at least six foot six, and he was built like one of Oren’s men.

“Is that why my mom changed her name?” I asked him. “Is that why she ran?”

The fisherman stared at me for a moment, his expression hard as rocks. “You don’t look much like Hannah,” he grunted. For one terrifying moment, I thought he might slam the door in my face. “Except for the eyes.”

With that, he let the door swing the rest of the way inward, and Oren, Grayson, and I followed him inside.

“Just the girl,” Jackson Currie growled without ever turning around.

I knew Oren was going to argue. “Please,” I told him. “Oren, please.”

“I’ll stay in the doorway.” Oren’s voice was like steel. “She stays in my sight at all times. You don’t come closer than three feet to her.”

I expected Jackson Currie to balk at all of that, but instead he nodded. “I like him,” he told me, then he issued another order. “The boy stays outside, too.”

The boy. As in Grayson. He didn’t like stepping back from me, but he did it. I turned for just a moment to watch him go.

“That the way it is?” Currie asked me, like he’d seen something in that moment that I hadn’t meant to show.

I turned back to him. “Please, just tell me about my mother.”

“Not much to tell,” he said. “She used to come check on me now and then. Always nagging at me to go to the hospital over every little scrape. She was in school to be a nurse. Wasn’t half-bad at stitches.”

She was in nursing school? That felt like such a mundane thing to be learning about my mother.

“She helped you nurse Toby after you pulled him from the water?” I said.

He nodded. “She did. Can’t say she particularly enjoyed it, but she was always going on about some oath.”

The Hippocratic oath. I dug through my memory and remembered the gist of it. “First do no harm.”

“It was the damnedest thing for a Rooney to say,” Currie grunted. “But Hannah always was the damnedest Rooney.”

The muscles in my throat tightened. “She helped you treat Toby even though she knew who he was. Even though she blamed him for her sister’s death.”

“You telling this story, or am I?”

I went silent, and after a second or two, my silence was rewarded. “She loved her sister, ya know. Always said Kaylie wasn’t like the rest of ’em. Hannah was going to get her out.”

My mom couldn’t have been more than three or four years older than me when all of this had gone down. Kaylie would have been her younger sister. I wanted to cry. At this point, I wasn’t even sure what else to ask, but I pushed on. “How long did Toby stay here after the accident?”

“Three months, give or take. He mostly healed up in that time.”

“And they fell in love.”

There was a long silence. “Hannah always was the damnedest Rooney.”

In other circumstances, it might have been harder for me to understand, but if Toby had been suffering from amnesia, he wouldn’t have known what had happened on the island. He wouldn’t have known about Kaylie—or who she was to my mother.

And my mom had a big heart. She might have hated him at first, but he was a Hawthorne, and I knew all too well that Hawthorne boys had a way about them.

“What happened after three months?” I asked.

“Kid’s memory came back.” Jackson shook his head. “They had a big fight that night. He came damn near close to killing himself, but she wouldn’t let him. He wanted to turn himself in, but she wouldn’t let him do that, either.”

“Why not?” I asked. No matter how in love with him she’d been, Toby was responsible for three deaths. He’d planned to set a fire that night, even if he’d never lit a match.

“How long you think the person who killed Kaylie Rooney would last in any jail hereabouts?” Jackson asked me. “Hannah wanted to run away, just the two of them, but the boy said no. He couldn’t do that to her.”

“Do what to her?” I asked. My mom had ended up running anyway. She’d changed her name. And three years later, there was me.

“Hell if I could make sense of either of ’em,” Jackson Currie muttered. “Here.” He tossed something at my feet. Behind me, Oren twitched, but he didn’t object when I moved forward to pick up the object on the ground. It was wrapped in linen. Unrolling it, I found two things: a letter and a small metal disk, the size of a quarter.

I read the letter. It didn’t take me long to realize that it was the one Toby had mentioned in the postcards.

Dear Hannah, the same backward as forward,

Please don’t hate me—or if you do, hate me for the right reasons. Hate me for being angry and selfish and stupid. Hate me for getting high and deciding that burning the dock wasn’t enough—we had to burn the house to really hit my father where it hurt. Hate me for letting the others play the game with me—for treating it like a game. Hate me for being the one who survived.

But don’t hate me for leaving.

You can tell me over and over again that I never would have struck the match. You can believe that. On good days, maybe I will, too. But three people are still dead because of me. I can’t stay here. I can’t stay with you. I don’t deserve to. I won’t go home, either. I won’t let my father pretend this away.

Sooner or later, he’ll figure this out. He always does. He’ll come for me, Hannah. He’ll try to make it all better. And if I let him find me, if I let him wag his silver tongue in my ear, I might start to believe him. I might be tempted to let him wash away my sins, the way that only billions can, so you and I can live happily ever after. But you deserve better than that. Your sister deserved better. And I deserve to fade away.

I won’t kill myself. You extracted that promise, and I will keep it. I won’t turn myself in. But we can’t be together. I can’t do that to you. I know you—I know that loving me must hurt you. And I won’t hurt you again.

Leave Rockaway Watch, Hannah. Without Kaylie, there’s nothing holding you here. Change your name. Start anew. You love fairy tales, I know, but I can’t be your happily-ever-after. We can’t stay here in our little castle forever. You have to find a new castle. You have to move on. You have to live, for me.

If you ever need anything, go to Jackson. You know what the circle is worth. You know why. You know everything. You might be the only person on this planet who knows the real me.

Hate me, if you can, for all the reasons I deserve it. But don’t hate me for leaving while you sleep. I knew you wouldn’t let me go, and I cannot bear to say good-bye.

Harry

I looked up from the letter, my ears ringing. “He signed it Harry.”

Jackson tilted his head to the side. “That’s what I called him ’fore I knew his name. It’s what Hannah called him, too.”

Something gave inside me. I closed my eyes and let my head fall, just for a moment. I had no idea what had happened between Toby leaving this shack twenty years ago and my mother’s death. If he was my father, he had to have found her at some point. They had to have been together again, if only once.

“He found me after she died,” I whispered. “He told me his name was Harry.”

“She’s dead?” Jackson Currie stared at me. “Little Hannah?”

I nodded. “Natural causes.” Given the context, that seemed important to clarify. Jackson turned suddenly. A second later, he was rummaging around in the cabinets. He thrust another object at me, coming close enough for our fingertips to brush this time.

“I was supposed to give this to Harry,” he grunted. “If he ever came back. Hannah sent them here, year after year. But if she’s gone—only seems right to give them to you.”

I looked down at the thing he’d just handed me. I was holding another bundle of postcards.