Page 16 of The Same Backward as Forward
I flashed back to tending to Toby Hawthorne’s burns, again and again.Harry.I used the name to build a wall up in my mind.His name is Harry. He’s of no interest to anyone in this room. He’s no one.
“Cat got your tongue, Hannah?” Rory asked suddenly. I heard the seething resentment buried in his tone. I’d seen him weak and punished. He wasn’t going to be forgiving that any time soon, especially when my mother had just shut him downagain.
I didn’t give myself long to debate how to respond. All I had to do was pretend that I wasn’t betraying the family, every second of every day. “This is supposed to be a wake,” I said. Rooneys knew how to retaliate, but they also knew how to mourn. “Kaylie was…” How could I even begin to put my sister into words? “She loved hard,” I said quietly.
My sister had never managed to keepanyoneat arm’s length. She’d lovedthem, and they were monsters.
“Kaylie was born hollering at the top of her lungs.” That was my mother, mourning. “Smiled for the first time when she was five weeks old and never stopped.”
Rory stared at me for another second, then lifted his beer. “To Kaylie,” he said sharply.
The toast caught on, and someone shoved a bottle into my hand. “To Kaylie,” I whispered.
Hours later, once they were all well and truly drunk, I managed to slip out. As I walked away from the house I’d grown upin, it hit me that, without Kaylie, there was nothing holding me in Rockaway Watch anymore, nothing stopping me from getting in my car and driving east and never coming back. I could transfer to a community college a thousand miles away, far enough that it wouldn’t be worth the family’s effort to come after me.
With Kaylie dead, they probably wouldn’t even be surprised. All I had to do wasleave.
So why did I drive back to my apartment instead? Why did I break down in the shower instead of getting the hell out of Dodge? Why did I get out of the damn shower, get dressed, and decide to go back to the shack?
Tohim?
Chapter 13
You’ve been drinking,” I said when Jackson let me in. The fisherman smelled like a distillery.
“You didn’t want Harry having it.” Jackson shrugged. “It was either this or pour the bottle out.” The fisherman’s tone made it obvious that pouring out whiskey had never been an option.
I decided that it was just as well that Jackson had apparently drained the bottle. If he’d been sober, he probably would have noticed my blotchy skin, my bloodshot eyes.
Between my sister and me, Kaylie had always been the pretty crier.
Soon enough, Jackson was out like a light. Harry was likewise unconscious. I lowered myself to the floor next to his mattress and thought about the information I’d gleaned at Kaylie’s wake. My patient’s billionaire father had sent people to Rockaway Watch to do damage control. In all likelihood, that meant that all I had to do to be rid of the giant liability before me was find a way to contact one of Tobias Hawthorne’s people. Within hours, if not minutes, they’d have the precious heir life-flighted to some fancy medical facility hundreds of miles away, where my family couldn’t touch him.
I thought about the press and imagined what coverage of theresurrection of Toby Hawthorne might look like.Would anyone even question your role in the fire?I asked him silently.Would you pin it all on a “troubled” girl?
I could feel the anger I’d denied myself in my mother’s presence taking hold of my body. My fingers curled into my palms as the muscles in my stomach slowly knotted. I felt my rage at the way the world would remember my sister in the ache of my jaw and the clench of my teeth.
I hate you.The words grounded me, soft and velvety in my mind as I laid a hand on Harry’s chest, outside the burns.
I hate you.
I hate you.
I hate you.
And then I heard the faintest of murmurs. I pulled my hand back and braced my fingers against the mattress. The room was dark, but I could hear his lips moving. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, and then he started to thrash. Towrithe.
I wondered when the last time he’d had pain medication was. I wondered why I even cared.
I grabbed the flashlight I’d left on the floor earlier and turned it on. My patient’s eyes weren’t open. He tossed his head violently back and forth, his whole body wracked with the force of that movement.
His burns.I did not want to hold him down. “Wake up,” I said, working to hold on to my anger.
He didn’t.
“Wake up.”
His lips moved again, the volume of his speech growing to the point that I could actually make out the words.“The tree…”
