Page 91 of The Hawthorne Legacy
“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.
