Page 85 of The Hawthorne Legacy
I’m sorry, Hannah, O Hannah. I’m sorry for leaving in the dead of night. I’m sorry for letting you love me even a fraction as much as I will, to the day I die, love you. I’m sorry for what I did. For the fire.
And I will never stop being sorry about your sister.
CHAPTER 70
Sister. That word echoed in my mind over and over again. Sister. Sister. Sister. “Toby told my mom—told Hannah—that he was sorry about her sister.” Thoughts crashed into one another in my brain, like a ten-car pileup, the cacophony deafening. “And in another postcard, he mentioned Kaylie. Kaylie Rooney—she’s the girl who died in the fire on Hawthorne Island. Sometime after that, my mom helped nurse Toby back to life. He didn’t remember what had happened, but he said that she hated him. She must have known.”
“Known what?” Libby asked, reminding me that I wasn’t just talking to myself.
I thought about the fire, the buried police report, Sheffield Grayson saying that Toby had purchased accelerant. “That Toby was responsible for her sister’s death.”
The next thing I knew, I had my laptop out, and I was doing yet another internet search on Kaylie Rooney. At first I didn’t find anything I hadn’t already seen, but then I started adding search terms. I tried sister and got nothing. I tried family, and I found the one and only interview with a member of the Rooney family. It wasn’t much of an interview. All the reporter had gotten out of Kaylie’s mother was, and I quote, My Kaylie was a good girl, and those rich bastards killed her. But there was also a picture. A photograph of… my grandmother? I tried to wrap my mind around that possibility. Then I heard the door open behind me.
Max poked her head into the room. “I come in peace.” She squeezed by the door and strolled past Oren. “For the record, I’m armed only with sarcasm.” Max ended her stroll right next to me and hopped up on the desk. “What are we doing?”
“Looking at a picture of my grandmother.” Saying the words made them feel just a little bit more real. “My mom’s mom. Maybe.”
Max stared at the picture. “Not maybe,” she said. “She even looks like your mom.”
The woman in the picture was scowling. I’d never seen my mom scowl. She had her hair pulled into a tight bun, and my mom always wore hers loose. Twenty years ago, this woman had looked decades older than my mom had when she died.
But still, Max was right. Their features were the same.
“How has no one made this connection?” Max asked incredulously. “With all the rumors about your mom, and people trying to find a connection between you and the Hawthornes, no one thought to look at the family of a girl they pretty much murdered? And what about your mom’s relatives and the people who knew her growing up? Someone must have recognized her, once you made the news. Why hasn’t anyone tipped off the press?”
I thought about Eli, selling me out for a payday. What kind of town was Rockaway Watch that no one would have done the same?
“I don’t know,” I told Max. “But I do know that whatever Tobias Hawthorne left in that safe-deposit box—that police report, his investigators’ files—I want to see it all. I need to see it. Now.”
CHAPTER 71
Oren retrieved the key from his toolbox, but he didn’t give it to me. He gave it to Zara, then told me to get ready for school.
“Have you lost your mind?” I asked him. “I’m not going to school.”
“It’s the safest place for you right now,” Oren said. “Alisa will agree with me.”
“Alisa’s doing damage control from the interview,” I retorted. “I’m sure the last thing she wants is me out in public. No one would question why I might want to stay home.”
“Country Day isn’t public,” Oren told me, and a few seconds later, he had Alisa on speakerphone, and she was echoing what he had said: I was to put on my private school uniform, put on my best face, and pretend that nothing had happened.
If we treated this like a crisis, it would be seen as a crisis.
Since I’d promised to keep Alisa in the loop, I told her everything, and she still didn’t change her mind. “Act normal,” she told me.
I hadn’t been normal in weeks. But less than an hour later, I was dressed in a pleated skirt, a white dress shirt, and a burgundy blazer, with my hair tousled just so and my makeup minimal, except for the eyes. Preppy with an edge, for all the world to see—or at least all the denizens of Heights Country Day School.
I felt like I had on my very first day. No one looked directly at me, but the way they were not-looking at me felt far more conspicuous. Jameson and Xander slipped out of the car after me, and each of them took one of my sides. At least this time, it was me and the Hawthornes against the world.
I made it through the day bit by bit, and by lunch, I was done. Done with the stares. Done pretending everything was normal. Done trying to put on a happy face. I was hiding—or making an attempt at it—in the archive when Jameson found me. “You look like someone who needs a distraction,” he told me.
A few feet away, Oren crossed his arms over his chest. “No.”
Jameson shot my bodyguard his most innocent look.
“I know you,” Oren replied. “I know your distractions. You’re not taking her skydiving. Or parasailing off the coast. No racetracks. No motorcycles. No ax throwing—”
“Ax throwing?” I looked at Jameson, intrigued.
