Page 2 of The Same Backward as Forward
The glass stayed exactly where he’d placed it.
“And what about you, palindrome girl?” The stranger’s hair still hung in his face, casting his razor-sharp cheekbones in shadow. “H-A-N-N-A-H.Will I seeyouaround? We could have a little fun, set the world on fire.” He held a hand to his heart and lowered his voice. “If you’re aHannawithout thehon the end, I don’t want to know.”
I was a Hannah with twoH’s, and I was supposed to be invisible. The two of us definitely wouldn’t be seeing each other again. We wouldn’t be setting the world on fire.
He never should haveseenme at all.
Fifteen minutes later, Kaylie was walking along the rocky shore the same way she’d glided over the edge of the pool table, like she lived life on the high wire. As I walked behind her, she looked up at the night sky, not even bothering to watch where she wasstepping. There was an energy to my sister, an unspokensomethingthat was a little frenetic and utterly full of life.
“You took their wallets, didn’t you?” I said, resigned to the answer before she even gave it.
Kaylie glanced back and smiled. “Only one.”
I didn’t have to askwhichone. She’d slowed as she’d passed him on the way out, the two of them a study in contrasts—his darkness, her light; razor-sharp angles versus full, teasing lips.
“Do you want to know his name?” Kaylie’s grin deepened, bringing out twin dimples as she brandished the stolen wallet between two fingers.
“No,” I said immediately.
“Liar.” She smiled again, wickedly this time. Based on past experience, I had about a hundred reasons not to trust that smile.
“You need to be careful,” I told her quietly. “You have a record now.”
I needed her to keep her hands clean for another year. That was all. By the time I finished nursing school, Kaylie would be eighteen, and I was going to get her out. We’d move far, far away, to a place where no one had ever heard of Rockaway Watch or the Rooney family.
She just needed to keep her head down until then.
“Honestly, Hannah? I’m not the one who needs to be careful. Youdon’thave a record.” Kaylie did a little one-footed spin to face me. In the moonlight, I could see the thick kohl rimming her cornflower-blue eyes, the dark lipstick she’d somehow managed not to smear. “You should go before we get much closer to the house,” she said. “You don’t want anyone to see you. Out of sight, out of mind.”
Kaylie was the one chink in my armor. She always had been. I’d given in to the impulse to check up on her tonight, but we bothknew that I was never more visible than when I stood in range of her glow.
“Be careful, Kaylie,” I repeated, and this time, I wasn’t just talking about stealing wallets or dancing on top of tables. I was talking about the rest of it. The family business.
With a roll of her eyes, my optimistic little sister tilted her face skyward once more, brave and brash and invincible, always, until she wasn’t. I couldn’t help thinking that maybe I should have left her at the bar, dancing and free and beckoning trouble toward her for the hell of it. But even if Kaylie had made it through the night without incident, even if she’d walked away soaked in adrenaline and unscathed, word of her night out would have gotten back. It always did.
And Kaylie being wild and free only served my mother’s interests—the Rooney family’s interests—to a point.
Chapter 2
My apartment honestly wasn’t much of one. I could reach the kitchen counter from the bed. My three measly kitchen cabinets held more books than pans. On good nights, I read until I fell asleep, wrapping myself in fantasy worlds like they were blankets. Tonight, I fell back on an older habit instead. Ripping a blank page out of one of my clinicals notebooks, I folded the top right corner of the paper down—and then I just kept folding.
Growing up, there had been times when having my nose in a book would have made me a target. I’d had to find other ways of beingelsewhere, tricks for daydreaming without ever losing track of the here and now. I’d taken to carrying scraps of paper in my pockets—a focus, something to occupy my hands.
Even now, alone in the apartment where I’d lived for the last two and a half years, there was something steadying to me about the familiar motion of folding a piece of paper in on itself again and again and again in different ways. The end result this time was an odd, jagged little shape.
I threw it away when I was done—and went to sleep.
In the dead of night, a voice jerked me back to consciousness like ice-cold water tossed over my prone form. “Get up.”
The voice was gravelly.This is not a dream.I had no recollection whatsoever of opening my eyes, but suddenly, they were open. My kitchen lights had been turned on. My mother was standing over me, and she wasn’t alone.
“You.” Her voice hardened. “Get up.” Eden Rooney wasn’t in the habit of asking anyone to do anything twice, so I took that as the warning it was and slipped out of bed, putting space between us and taking in the person standing in my mother’s shadow.
My cousin Rory was scowling—and bleeding.
“Fix him.” My mother didn’t makerequests.
I eyed Rory’s injuries, but all I could think was that it had been two and a half years since I’d moved out. I hadn’t asked for my mother’s permission to leave. She hadn’t come after me. She’dletme get comfortable, and now…
