Page 22 of The Same Backward as Forward

“The pain, Hannah.” Jackson was a no-frills kind of person at the best of times. This wasn’t the best of times, and there wasn’t an ounce of sugarcoating in his tone. “It’s getting worse. A whole hell of a lot worse.”

“It shouldn’t be,” I said quietly.Should it?I approached the patient, an uncharacteristic hesitation in my step.

“Don’t touch me.” For once, there was nothing smooth in Harry’s tone, nothing dark or knowing.

I wished I’d bought the damn bourbon.

I laid the back of my hand against first his cheek, then his forehead.Hot to the touch.“I have no desire whatsoever to touch you,” I murmured—but I did, again and again, checking his injuries.

At a certain point, it became clear to me that no touch was gentle enough.

There’s something wrong.I’d examined everything but the burns on his chest. As I braced myself to do what had to be done, my gaze caught on an object sitting beside him on the mattress: a tiny, intricate paper cube.Thirty folds, at least.

“You folded this.” I didn’t phrase it as a question.

“Won the paper off Jackson,” Harry said. He was looking at me now, and his eyes were a little glassy.

I touched his face again, confirming what I’d felt before.Fever.

“The question, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward,” he said, his voice closer to a whisper than a rasp, “is whether you can unfold it without tearing the page.”

I didn’t touch the paper cube until he fell into a fitful sleep. By that point, I’d already looked at his chest.

It didn’t look good.

Chapter 18

On my lunch break the next day, I didn’t go to the hospital cafeteria. I went to the ER. There was a vending machine near intake, which was as close as I could get to the pit without drawing attention.

I needed to find a way past the double doors. I needed to talk to someone in trauma. And somehow, I needed to find a way to steal and smuggle out a healthy supply of Lactated Ringer’s, an entire course of intravenous antibiotics, and, if I could manage it, some morphine.

The fact that I was even there, the fact that I was evenconsideringthrowing my life away like this—forhim—was unfathomable, but it was either that or admit that Jackson and I were in over our heads. I couldn’t see any other way out that didn’t end with bloodshed.

I hadn’t been able to save Kaylie, but I could do this. Ihadto do this.

I was on my third pack of vending machine Oreos when my supervisor sat down in the chair next to me in the waiting room.

“Did someone call you?” I asked her.

That got me alook. “Do you think I need someone to tell me what’s going on in my own hospital?”

Most of the doctors who worked here probably would have objected to the suggestion that this hospital belonged to a single nurse from oncology, but I was smart enough not to argue.

“You going to tell me why you’re lurking down here?” she said.

I looked toward the doors I hadn’t yet pushed my way past.

“Thinking about emergency medicine for your next rotation?” my supervisor guessed bluntly. “Trauma?” She paused. “Maybe the burn unit?”

She doesn’t know.A breath caught in my throat.She can’t.

“You couldn’t have saved her, Hannah.”

Her.I realized that she thought that this was about my sister, about my grief.

“Maybe not,” I said. “But maybe I could save someone like her.” I swallowed, then covered. “Next time.”

My supervisor considered that. “As it happens,” she said finally, “someone in the burn unit owes me a favor.”