Page 34 of The Same Backward as Forward
“Then what else would you—” I cut myself off. “Numbers. We’re playing Hangman incode?”
“As fond as my people are of wagers, I believe we’re also very fond of skewing the game.” Harry twirled the pen in his fingers like a miniature baton. “In my defense, you have as many guesses as the hairs on your head, the stars in the sky, and the number of ways you’ve imagined wiping this smug expression right off of my classically handsome face.”
“You’re not that handsome,” I said darkly.
He smiled. “Did you know thatbugiardais Italian for ‘liar’?”
After guessing the numbers one through twenty-six, it was apparent that this wasn’t going to be an easy code to break. Only four numbers had resulted in himnotadding a stroke to his drawing of my face:5,3,7, and2. Each number was used only once, the remaining spaces blank.
“Hypothetically speaking…” I fixed Harry with a look. “What’s the range of numbers in your code?”
“Hypothetically? It might range from two to three hundred and ten.”
Three hundred and ten?Therehadto be some significance to that.
“Care to guess again?” Harry taunted, and I tried not to think about what his sketch might look like once I’d guessed all of the numbers left up to three hundred and ten.
I stared at the puzzle, ignoring the second napkin altogether.
I needed to take my time, to look at this from every angle before I gave him a chance to send me wandering off down a path ofhischoosing. “Put the pen down and get up,” I ordered. “We’re done for today.”
Chapter 29
After a long shift the next day, I came back and guessed every single number between twenty-seven and three hundred and ten. In my hours away, I hadn’t come up with any better strategy.
As the numbers were filled in on the puzzle, my face took shape on the other napkin. I’d been wrong when I’d inferred that Harry was an excellent artist.
He was aremarkableone.
It wasn’t just that he’d captured my features. It was thewayhe’d done it. My wide-set eyes looked like they were fixed on something in the distance. There was an almost dreamy look in them that was completely at odds with the hardness he’d captured in my jaw. He’d drawn my lips slightly parted and twin lines between my brows—not quite afurrow. My cheekbones were sharp, but he’d somehow managed to make my cheeks look soft. He’d drawn my neck long, my hair loose and a little wild, like I was standing on a cliff, staring into the wind.
Somehow, the overall effect wasn’t soft or hard or sharp or dreamy or wild or any of the descriptors that fit its individual components. I just looked…alive.
I had no idea how he’d managed to make me look likethatwithout exaggerating a single one of my features or forcing emotion onto them in a way that would have at least told me he’d taken some artistic license. But he hadn’t. There wasn’t a single part of his sketch that I could look at and think,that’s not me, and yet, there was absolutelynothingnondescript about the person he’d drawn.
“Thoughts?” His voice broke into my mind.
I told myself that he wasn’t asking about the drawing and looked at the puzzle instead.
I’d hoped for some repeat numbers—or better yet, repeated combinations of numbers—but every single number in the code was unique.
This was impossible. Literally. There was no way for me to figure out what any of those numbers stood for.
“You could start by writing out the letters of the alphabet.” Harry was beyondsmug. “See if anything jumps out to you.”
Was that a hint or just gloating? With him, there was no way to tell, but on the bright side, the more annoyed I became with the puzzle, the closer I came to being able to forget that drawing and the way I looked through his eyes.
Ignoring his suggestion to write down the letters of the alphabet, I focused on looking at the numbers themselves.Four single-digit numbers. Only one three-digit number.I set all four of those aside for a moment. Of the ten two-digit numbers, five started with a three; three started with a four; and there was one each starting with a two and a five.
“I really would recommend writing out the alphabet,” Harry drawled, altogether too pleased with himself.
That was definitely a clue, and I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of seeing me take it.
“Enough playing around,” I said. “I still have one more day, and we have work to do.”
He reached for the other napkin, the one on which he’d drawn me, stroke by stroke and line by line. He looked from the sketch to the expression on my face now. “And there you are,” he murmured, his voice rolling over me like a summer storm rolling in. “There,” he repeated, a rumble in his quiet voice, “you are.”
The next day, I had the kind of shift where breaks were few and far between. I’d heard nurses in labor and delivery say that the maternity ward always got crowded when there was a full moon. It made no sense whatsoever, but oncology was the same way—at least today.
