Page 51 of The Same Backward as Forward
My body knew the path by heart. I could have hiked the rocky trail in my sleep, but I was beyond awake—heart-pounding, breath-a-little-shallow, body-on-high-alert, might-never-sleep-againawake.
I opened the lighthouse door expecting it to be dark inside and was greeted with light. Candles, at least a dozen of them, had been scattered around the perimeter of the room. I had no idea where Harry had even gotten them.
In the middle of the floor, there was a light-blue blanket. Harry was sprawled out on it, waiting for me. In front of him, there was checkerboard—but notjusta checkerboard. It looked like he’d cut out the individual squares with one of Jackson’s knives and rebuilt it from scratch. Some marvel of ingenuity and engineering made it look like most of those squares were hovering midair.
“Three-dimensional checkers.” Coming from Harry, that was equal parts invitation and challenge.
I stood for a moment in the doorway, taking in the candles and the blanket and thegame, and something in me broke a little. “We have to go.” My voice came out hoarse. “Tonight.” I closed my eyes, a phantom hand locking around my heart. “Now.”
I heard Harry get up. I heard him coming closer. The Close Your Eyes Game. I felt each and every step he took.
“We don’t have to do anything.” His voice started soft, then grew in strength and volume, in intensity. “I don’t need anything, Hannah, except this.”
His voice surrounded me. He was right in front of me now, and I couldn’t bear to open my eyes.
“Except you,” he whispered.
I couldn’t keep my eyes closed any longer, and when I opened them, dark green eyes, shining with the light of bad ideas and worse ones, met mine.
“If who I am is a problem, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward, thento hellwith who I am.” His voice was everywhere.Hewas everywhere I looked, and I could tell: He meant it. “I don’t care about who I was before. I don’t care about that life. I care about this one, aboutyou. We can stay here or we can go, we can run or we can hide, but anything I do—I am doing itwith you.”
A breath caught in my throat, and I forced myself to keep breathing, the way he always had, through the pain. “You don’t understand,” I said. “You don’t know what you would be giving up.”
From the very beginning, I’d known that someday he would go back to being Tobias Hawthorne the Second, the only son of a billionaire, with the world at the tips of his fingers. I had assumed from the beginning that someday he would find out about Hawthorne Island, about Kaylie, about all of it.
But what if he didn’t have to?
He’d been running from something. What if hedidn’tgo back? What if he stayedHarryand Toby Hawthorne stayed dead?
What if, this time, we ran together?
“I know what I won’t give up, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward.” Harry’s hands made their way to my face. “I won’t give up the person I am with you. For you.This…” His fingers explored the contours of my jaw, my cheekbones, my temples, like he was attempting to see me with all of his senses at the same time. “Thisis real. My life before can stay a bad dream, and you can tell me,Hannah, O Hannah—who made you look like this?”
Hannah, O Hannah.Another palindrome. I might have responded to that, if it wasn’t for his question.Who made you look like this?
I’d almost forgotten about Rory, about the reason that tonight was it, the reason wehadto go. Now.
“One of my cousins.” I wasn’t going to lie to him—not about this, not when I was considering spending the rest of my life lying to him by omission so we could live a fairy tale. Together.
“Did he threaten you?” Harry clipped the words, and the lines ofhisface hardened. “Touch you? I’ll kill him.”
“No.” That was the last thing we needed. “You won’t. We’re running.”
“We,” Harry repeated, and just like that, with one word, my decision was made.
“We’ll start over,” I whispered, “far, far away.”
That had always been a part of my plan—leaving this world behind, leaving my family behind. And from the time I was a child, I’d never planned on going alone.
“Far, far away,” Harry repeated. He pulled me toward him, his lips coming down on mine little by little by little. “Once upon a time…”
I kissed him back, kissed him like we were caught in the rain, like we were standing at the edge of the Eiffel Tower, like I’d just found him in the dark, like if I kissed him hard enough and long enough, nothing in this world would exist except the two of us.
Once upon a time… far, far away…
“Sagas,” I whispered, kissing the exact spot on his neck where I could feel his pulse. “Level. Aha.”Palindromes.
He grinned and pushed me lightly back against the lighthouse wall, pulling off his own shirt and offering up an aching, whispered palindrome of his own.“Wow.”
