Page 24 of The Same Backward as Forward
Her last night on earth, my sister had only stolen one.
I flipped it open, and Toby Hawthorne’s picture stared back at me from his driver’s license. I would have recognized that smirk anywhere, but his eyes looked different to me in the photo—the shape of them, opened wider than I’d ever seen them.He’s not drunk or high there.
He was smiling with his eyes, lesscome hitherthanshall I let you in on the grandest joke?
Suddenly, I heard footsteps coming down the hall.
I jammed the wallet and the bag of pills into the waistband of my scrubs, covering them with my shirt. Seven seconds later, when my father opened the door, I was crouched beside Kaylie’s clothes again, her sleepshirt clasped in my hands.
Citrus and rose.
My father—ourfather—stared at me from the doorway. “I know,” he said quietly.
He knew that I was mourning. He knew that I’d loved Kaylie with everything I had.You don’t know why I’m really here. You don’t know what I’ve done—what I just did.
“But, Hannah?”
I stood and met my father’s eyes.
“If you wantout…” His voice went down an octave. “Don’t come back here again. I can only hold her off for so long.”
Chapter 20
The avenging angel returns.” Those were the first words out of Harry’s mouth when he saw me.
“I unfolded the paper,” I told him, setting my messenger bag down on the floor. I began to unpack my pilfered supplies. “And, for the record, you’re wrong.”
I addressed my next words to Jackson, who stood with his back against the wall, watching the two of us. “I’m doing another IV. I need you to sanitize the needle, however you can.”
I worked in silence. Thirty seconds after sliding the IV into Harry’s vein, I was injecting the antibiotics into it. Then I reached into my bag again—for the oxy.
“Wrong?” Harry said. “Moi?”
“Some things don’t hurt,” I told him. “Some things are numb.” I opened the baggie. “Some things need to stay that way.”
I was talking about him, and I was talking aboutme.
“What did you do, Hannah?” Jackson’s voice was low—and alarmed.
I didn’t even look back at him as I gave Harry the oxy. “What I had to.”
For five days, Harry and I barely said a word to each other on my nightly visits. I brought pills, and he left me offerings on the floor beside his mattress. Half of them were folded-paper marvels, each more elaborate than the last. The other half consisted of grocery lists.
Even with the oxy, he still wanted bourbon—and lemons.
Freaking lemons.
The antibiotics did the trick with whatever infection his body had been cooking up, and dosing him with the oxy let me do more than dress his burns. Using what I’d seen in the burn unit and a scalpel from Jackson’s med kit, I’d started removing dead skin.
Sometimes, my patient cursed me for it. Sometimes, I ignored him. Sometimes, I cursed him right back.
Every day, Harry wanted more pills—and more and more and more. Once he’d turned a corner, I started cutting him back, and he got really charming.
“I’m guessing you’re a virgin.”
That didn’t merit a response, so I didn’t give him one.
He let his eyes rake over mine and down, his gaze settling somewhere in the vicinity of my lips. “You’re too easy,” he commented, but it was clear from his tone: He wasn’t talking about sex anymore. He was talking about getting a rise out of me.
