Page 123 of The Same Backward as Forward

“Deifier,” I whisper back.

“You can’t come back here again.” Hannah kisses me like she’s dreamed of kissing me every single night for years. It’s the kind of kiss that says,There you are. The kind that says her body was made for mine and mine for hers.

She kisses me like this isn’tgood-bye.

“The world takes, and it takes, and it takes,” I murmur.

“And we burn, and we burn, and we burn,” Hannah replies, still kissing me, her words a lament and a prayer and a promise all at once.

“But sometimes, with the right person…” My voice breaks, and I pull back because I don’t think that she can, and whatever Hannah the Same Backward as Forward needs from me, I will do. Always. “Sometimes,” I say again, aching in ways I can’t even describe, “it’s enough.”

Knowing that she and Avery are safe. Knowing that Avery is Hannah’s world. Knowing that what Hannah and I have was and is and always will bereal.

One last eternity.

It’s enough.

Epilogue: Years Later

Avery has her mother’s eyes. She’s a teenager now, and the two of us are locked in a chess game—and not our first, not by a long shot. We play in a public park. She thinks that I’m a homeless man, and technically, she’s right.

But I amhere.

I am here because Hannah the Same Backward as Forward is not.

Nine years, one month, and twenty-three days.That’s how much time passed between the night Hannah and I kissed good-bye and the morning that a child in Seoul handed me a book of fairy tales written in a language I neither recognized nor understood.

Inside that book, there was a program—from a funeral.

I remember staring at the tombstone, wanting to believe that it was a lie and thinking,We always were liars, Hannah and me.But even though the name carved into the stone was S-A-R-A-H instead of H-A-N-N-A-H, I knew that it was real.

I knew that she wasgone.

Because Hannah never would have left her daughter—not if her heart was capable of beating, not if there was a single breath left in her lungs.

I don’t remember falling to my knees, but I remember being on them. I remember digging my fingers into the dirt and thinking about Jackson, burying his whiskey. I remember thinking that I’d learned to live without Hannah the Same Backward as Forward, day after day, but that the idea of living in a world without her in it made me feel like I was right back in the stone room.

Or bleeding out in an alley.

Or standing on a cliff, staring into a black-hole abyss.

I remember thinking:Everything hurts.

The first time I played chess in the park with Avery, I told myself that I just needed to see her, that I just needed to know that she was going to be okay. The second time, I managed to figure out that she was living with an older half sister. The third time, I tailed her back to her sister’s apartment and watched the two of them together.

They reminded me a bit of Hannah and Kaylie.

By the fifth time I played chess with Avery, she’d beaten me twice.

By the sixth time, thrice.

And by the seventh, Avery must have realized that it had been days since I’d really eaten, because she proposed a wager: If she won, I had to let her buy me a sandwich.

I stayed.

And I stayed.

And I stayed.