Page 122 of The Same Backward as Forward

“I know,” Hannah says again, and this time, she elaborates, “about your mother.”

“My mother is dead.” I have always been an excellent bluffer. “She died years ago.”

“Alice came to see me.” Hannah’s words cut my lies off at the knees. “Avery was a toddler at the time, getting into everything like defeating babyproofing was her mission in life. Pure chaos.”

My mind is churning, and the ground under my feet doesn’t feel the least bit solid, but there’s something about the way that Hannah sayspure chaosthat makes me respond to that first. “Clearly, babyproofing was just a series of puzzles youwantedher to solve.”

One thing about Hannah: I can still surprise a laugh out of her.

One thing about me: I have to ask. “What did my motherwant?” It chills me to think the woman warned me to stay away, told me that I had to stay dead, and then revealedherselfto Hannah.

“She made me an offer.”

“What kind of offer?”

Hannah lifts her hand to the side of my face, and something gives inside me. It’s been so long since anyone has touched me—and so much longer sinceshehas. Every part of her calls to every part of me, so much so that it takes me a moment to realize thatthisis Hannah’s answer to my question.

Thisis what my mother offered her.

“Me.” My voice comes out raspy. Hannah’s left hand joins her right on my face.

Every part of you. Every part of me.

She pushes her fingers back into my hair. I reach up and echo her movement—my hands, her hair.

And then I make an inference, the only inference Icanmake. “You said no.”

My mother offered Hannah a way to be with me, and Hannah said no.

“I would have had to disappear, and Avery—” Hannah can’t even finish that sentence, and I understand immediately. Avery iseverythingto Hannah. Avery is the world and the whole damn sky.

“Are you in any danger,” I ask, my voice fierce, “from saying no?”

Hannah’s fingers curl into my hair. “Only if you stay.”

The wordstaymeans something to me. Back when my world was darkness and pain, Hannahstayed.

“I don’t understand,” I say.

“We’re not supposed to understand,” Hannah tells me.It wouldn’t be safe to.She doesn’t tell me that. She doesn’t have to.

It goes against my instincts to see a mystery and not even tryto solve it, but I can’t help thinking—as I have so many times in these past few years—about the way my mother reacted when I handed her that postcard the night Avery was born, the one with the hooded figure on the back.

It could be worse.It was clear to me then, and it’s clear now: We want no part ofworse.

I swallow. “Tell me one thing,” I murmur, bringing my hands to trace Hannah’s jaw, her cheekbones, memorizing the feel of her, “about our girl.”

I wish that my last name wasn’t Hawthorne. I wish that I had grown up in an ordinary family with an ordinary father and an ordinary mother.

I wish that I were an ordinary man.

Hannah begins tracing my jaw and cheeks the way I am tracing hers. “Avery,” she tells me, “is not interested in doing easy things.”

I smile, even though it hurts. “Some of us aren’t made for easy.”

The air between us thick with things we cannot bring ourselves to say, Hannah brings her lips to mine, and I think the wordsjust this oncebecause I can’t bear to thinkone last time.

“Reified,” Hannah whispers as I kiss her, as she kisses me.