Page 114 of The Same Backward as Forward

My mother was the ultimate hostess.

“Would you prefer I die right here?” I drawl.

“You can’t. You promised that girl of yours that you would not harm yourself.”

I want to believe that’s just another mind game, like talking to me in my mother’s voice. I want to believe he’s bluffing, testing a theory and nothing more. I want to believe that Tobias Hawthorne has no idea who Hannah is, but he is a master of connecting dots, of plucking conclusions out of thin air.

“You stay away from her,” I say, my voice low and more than a little dangerous as I climb to my feet.

“What precisely is it that you believe I am going to do to her, dear boy?”

Dear boy.He’s even using my mother’s word choices. “Stop it,” I bite out. “Stop using that voice. I know Mother is dead.”

“I’m dead,” the voice agrees. “But then… so are you.”

I have no argument for that.

“When you were very young,” my mother’s voice says, “you told me that you wanted a secret name, one that no one else in our family would ever know. And I gave you one. Do you remember what it was?”

I remember the name my mother gave me. I am certain my father never knew it. And when she speaks that name, I know:

This is no trick. I am talking to my mother. And like me, she is a ghost.

“What do you want?” I ask hoarsely.

“What a person wants is far less important than what must be.” There’s a certain detachment to those words that makes me think I am missing at least part of their meaning. “Your father,” the voice continues, “is grieving.”

“Grieving you or grieving me?”

“He suspects you’re alive, Toby. He’s looking for you.” She pauses, just for a moment. “And you, dear boy, will lead him on a merry chase, starting in… Tokyo, shall we say?”

“And why would I do that?” Nothing about this exchange makes sense to me. Why would my mother fake her death? How did she find me? Save me? Bring me here?

And where the hell am I?

“You’ll do as I ask, Toby, because as long as your father is focused on trackingyoudown, as long as you continually evade him and give him just enough breadcrumbs to follow, he won’t have nearly as much time to look for your Hannah.”

It doesn’t get clearer than that: My mother was not bluffing earlier.

“She goes bySarahnow, lives in Connecticut, a town called New Castle that is not nearly so quaint as it sounds.”

New Castle.I told Hannah she had to find herself a new castle.

“I like her,” my dead mother says. “She’s quite… capable.”

There’s something about the way my mother says the wordcapablethat has me thinking back to being locked in a different room with a maze on the wall, a most unusual method of detox. I think back to what my mother said to me, when I finally broke out of that room and assumed that it had been my father’s doing.

It’s hardly likely to have been mine.

I find myself suddenly doubting that.

“Occupy your father for me, Toby.” I know an order when I hear one. “And never let me catch you pulling a stunt likethisagain.”

Chapter 40

Hours pass, and I refuse to even look at the maze on the walls, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t get back to the story I was spinning for myself before, to the fairy tale that might have had a very different ending. I can’t stop thinking—and thinking and thinking andthinking, the way I haven’t for months. It’s like a part of me is waking up.

A dead woman, alive. The suggestion that what a person wants is not nearly as important as what must be.And then there is the fact that my mother found Hannah, capable Hannah, who lives in a place called New Castle. I wonder if she dances still, for Kaylie.