Page 110 of The Same Backward as Forward

Yes—

I already have. I can’t stay here.I stare at the drop-off like I’m staring into the abyss.I don’t deserve to be here.It’s a long way down, and the rocks below are jagged, and the pain is more than I can take.I can’t—

I fight the arms that hold me, and Hannah fights back—with everything she has, with everything she is, she fights to hold on to me.

“You told me…” The evening air feels like smoke in my lungs. Everything hurts. “You told me I didn’tgetto die.”

“You don’t.” Hannah catches my chin in her hand and forces my eyes to hers.Everything eyes. Gray and blue and green and brown. Rings of color like rings on a tree.“Not now, not ever until you’re old and gray. Do you hear me, Toby Hawthorne?”

I hear her. I see her. She is intensity made flesh, the fierceness of undying love incarnate.

“You don’t get to die on me,” Hannah tells me, her voice dangerously low. “You don’t get to make melove youand then destroy yourself.”

My life as I have known it began with her eyes, and I force myself to look right at them as I say what has to be said. “You don’t love me. You can’t. I killed her.”

“It was an accident.”

Hannah, O Hannah. H-A-N-N-A-H.

“It was an accident, Toby.”Her voice is fiercer, wilder, more insistent, and among everything I remember, there is this: I never struck a match. I never used the lighter. I was on the patio—the cliffside patio—when lightning struck, when it set the world ablaze.

But what does that matter? What does any of it matter when they’re all dead.

“You hated me.” I love everything about Hannah. Even with a lifetime of memories in my mind, I cannot shake the feeling that I always have.

I have always loved you, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward, and you were right to hate me.

“I hated you until I loved you,” Hannah tells me, and even now, she’s Hannah, through and through, “and I will love you until the end. So whatever you’re thinking right now, get it outof your mind.” Hannah’s voice is shaking. Her body is shaking. “I have lost enough, Toby.”

Kaylie.She lostKaylie.Because of me.

“I’m not going to lose you, too.Do you understand me?”

All I can think is that I should not be here, that she should not love me, that I never should have made her love me, no matter how much I loved her. Jackson tried to warn me.

You don’t know what you don’t know.

“Promise me.” Hannah’s hands are on my face now. The wind is whipping at her hair, but she doesn’t even seem to feel it.

I don’t feel it, either. All I feel is her.

“Promise me,” she says, “that you will live.”

Chapter 36

After I give Hannah my oath, I give her my story—all of it. The things that once pained me so much matter very little to me now. I am a Hawthorne, the only son of one of the country’s richest men, but I am also not a Hawthorne. I was sixteen when I discovered that my parents committed fraud the day I was born. Had they wanted to, they easily could have adopted me, but there was noadoption, only deception—a faked pregnancy, a faked birth.

Right from the beginning, my entire existence was a lie.

It was three years before I fully pieced together my origin: My biological mother was a trusting teenage girl, my biological father a grown man who met a violent—and perhaps deserved—end at Hawthorne hands. I am living, breathing proof of what happened.

I ammotive.

I am the fruit of a poisoned tree, and in a grand stroke of irony, the dead man’s name was William Blake. I have seen what remains of him. I have held his bones in my hands. I took a knife in my hands and carved words into the white marble altar inside which I found his remains.

I KNOW WHAT YOU DID, FATHER.

Under the floorboards of Jackson’s shack, there is proof ofwhat transpired, of who I truly am.A small bit of metal, a Blake family heirloom.