Page 115 of The Same Backward as Forward
I wonder how often she thinks of me.
For so long, I have been a shell of a person, a ghost. But now, suddenly, I can feel a sense of purpose growing in me, because if my mother found Hannah, my father could, too—unless he’s otherwise occupied.
Occupy your father for me, Toby.My mother obviously has her own reasons for wanting to keep my father’s attention diverted. I have no idea why she would fake her death, but I don’t know that it matters.
The only thing that matters to me, the only thing that has ever truly mattered to me, is Hannah.
I work the maze. I find the place where three paths converge. I depress the hidden trigger. The wall beside me parts and opens to a room that is empty but for a piece of paper on the floor.
On it, there is a picture of a cargo ship—and the name and address of a wharf. I have no idea when this vessel is scheduled to ship out, but I know exactly where it is going.
Tokyo.
Days. Months. Years. Tokyo, Bangkok, Bucharest—and that’s just the beginning. I run, and I hide. I cross oceans, working under-the-table jobs on freighters where no one speaks a word of English to me. But no matter where I go, one truth remains: My father is a resourceful man.
I lead him on a chase that is not, by any definition, merry, and occasionally, when the life I am living on the run takes me through a place that feels a little magical, a place that makes me think of Hannah, I buy—or steal—a postcard.
I write to her—in invisible ink, messages I will never send. I sign themfrom Harry.
Tobyremains dead, and I remain a ghost, but I do what I need to in order to survive, including defending myself against stray knives, if only to ensure that I can pop my head up often enough to keep my father’s attention squarely on me.
It’s obvious he knows I survived the fire. I wonder sometimes if he has a theory about how, if he has ever zeroed in on a reclusive fisherman who was out on the water that night. I wonder if any of the many men that billionaire Tobias Hawthorne has hired to look for me over the years have heard whisperings in the town where Hannah grew up about the Rooney girl who disappeared, the one who was in school to become a nurse.
I wonder how long it will take my brilliant, resourceful, Machiavellian father to figure out that my heart is in New Castle, Connecticut.
And then one day, more than a thousand days into my nomadic, self-imposed exile, a man bumps into me on a busy street in one of the most dangerous cities in the world, and I realize all of three seconds later that he has shoved something into my pocket.
By the time my fingers close around the object, the man is gone.
A postcard.I withdraw it, the hairs on the back of my neck standing straight up. On the front of the postcard, there is a fairy-tale scene: a girl with raven hair in a white cloak, standing at the edge of an enchanted wood, looking up at a Gothic castle in the distance. The back of the postcard appears blank only until I find a homeless encampment where a fire is burning in a trash can.
I hold the postcard up to the flames, and slowly, ink appears. I clock the words first, written in a hand that I do not recognize:HANNAH NEEDS YOU.
Beneath the words, there is a black-and-white drawing.Hannah.It’s been so long since I’ve seen her that I hungrily drink in each line of the drawing. Her hair is shorter now, her face a bit fuller, but theexpression—it’s Hannah,myHannah, Hannah, through and through.
I spend so long staring at her face that I almost miss the obvious.Her body.
My lungs seize up, just for a moment, and even after I start breathing again, the world threatens to spin around me.
The Hannah in this drawing is pregnant.
Chapter 41
I am well aware that this could be a trap, but it doesn’t matter. Either my mother has chosen to break her years-long silence to send this to me, or my father wants to lure me out into the open in a small town where I’ll have a much harder time disappearing.
Either way, I have to go.
I cover my tracks—and then some. I am an expert at both running and hiding. But for the first time in years, I runtowardsomething.
Someone.
When I arrive in New Castle, the clouds overhead are dark gray midday. It’s obvious before the first drop of rain even begins to fall that a storm is coming.
It seems appropriate. A storm brought me to Hannah once before.
I find the only hospital in town and wait in the shadows. Part of me expects her to just appear, wearing faded blue, her hair falling slightly into her face. Hours pass, and eventually I approach two women in scrubs and show them a drawing of Hannah—not the one I was sent but one I made.
One of them tells me that she’ll call security if I don’t leave, but the other one looks at me—really looks at me—in a way thatno one has in a very long time, and then she tells me that I’m at the wrong place.
