Page 19 of The Same Backward as Forward

I shouldn’t havefeltit at all.

I didn’t like the look of the third-degree burns on his chest. The others were improving, but not those. The skin was white in places, black in others. Toward the outside of the wound, where third-degree gave way to second, the skin was blistered beyond belief. Those nerve endings hadn’t been destroyed, so that waswhere his pain was the worst, but it was the area dead center on his torso that concerned me the most—that was the area still at risk for infection, the area where the damage could go deeper than I knew.

I bandaged it and looked away, overly aware even as I did that he was stillwatchingme, pain in his dark green eyes and a smirk on his lips.

After Harry’s days of silence passed, he seemed intent on making up for them—on making conversation. “You work at a hospital.”

“Brilliant deduction,” I replied.

“You wound me, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward.”

“Don’t call me that.”

Harry raked his gaze over my mouth and smiled slightly at whatever he saw there. “Sounds like you might be interested in another wager.”

Jackson had left me alone with our patient. I had the day off, and the fisherman still had a living to make. The closer the town recluse stuck to his routine, the less likely he was to draw attention. But that meant that I couldn’t just be in and out, checking on Harry. I had to stay.

I didn’t trust my patient alone.

“Five-Card Draw?” I said. “If I win, you ditch the nickname forever and agree not to talk to me—and or evenlookat me—for three days.”

“Steep price, not looking at you.” He raked his gaze over my face—eyes, mouth, lips, jaw, then eyes again. “What will you give me in return?”

I folded my arms. “A piece of paper.”

“You drive a hard bargain.” He smiled, the curl of his lips deliberate and slow. “But I’ll accept your terms.”

I dealt the cards. Taking in my hand, I decided to play it safe, knowing he wouldn’t. I placed two cards face down.

“It’s always two with you.” Harry seemed to find some satisfaction in that observation. Too much, really.

“Let me guess,” I said. “You don’t need a single card.”

“Do you like being wrong?” He took two as well. I knew from the second he saw his new cards that whatever he’d drawn didn’t bode well for me.

“I call,” I said.

Harry laid down his cards. “Full house.”

I laid down a pair of aces.

“Those are the breaks, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward. The nickname stays.”

I walked over to the table and tore a page out of the notebook I’d bought at the drugstore, then returned to the mattress and dropped it, right beside his face.

“Did I do something to offend you, liar mine?”

I’m not your anything.I didn’t say that. My quiet was the kind that didn’t blink. Didn’t flinch. “Do you want a list?”

He took his time responding, like he was rolling my question over in his mind the way I’d once seen him roll pool chalk over and under highly skilled fingers, one after another. “I get the sense,” he said, his voice quiet and deep, like the calm before a storm, like still waters in the dead of night, “that I don’t know how towantanything anymore.”

Just like that, the walls in my mind came down. Just like that, I saw the boy I’d met that night at the bar, daring his glass to fall, knowing that it wouldn’t. I saw the person who’d paid fartoo much attention to me, even then. The one who’d bought kerosene.Toby.

And in the next breath, I thought about my dancing, smiling, fearless sister going up in flames.

I stood and stalked away from the boy on the bed, but I couldn’t leave. I was stuck there until Jackson got back. If I didn’t steer the conversation,hewould.

Harry. Think of him as Harry.“What tree?” I said, my voice quiet, even, everything he’d probably come to expect of me.