Page 42 of The Same Backward as Forward

Light seeped through the cracks in the lighthouse walls. It was morning. I extracted myself as carefully as I could from the arms wrapped around me.

Thiswas real.Thiswasn’t a dream. I grounded myself in that knowledge, in the sound of Harry’s breath and the lingering feel of his warmth on my skin, and then I left in absolute silence and stepped outside to a morning utterly devoid of wind.

I walked to stand exactly where I had in my dream, but my sister never came. Ghosts weren’t real. Dreams weren’t, either. But the specter my mind had conjured up—it had felt like Kaylie, feltso muchlike her that the promise she’d forced out of me felt real.

No regrets.Those two words summarized my sister betterthan any others possibly could. If she’d been more capable of regret, maybe she would have been more capable of caution, of holding grudges, of looking backward or forward or anywhere but thenow.

Promise me…I could hear her in my mind, and even though my instinct was to bow my head the second my eyes started to sting, I bent my neck backward instead, tilting my face up to the morning sky.Don’t stop. Living. Loving. Dancing.

My breathing went ragged as tears began to slowly carve their way down my face, one after another. And then I heard the sound of footsteps behind me.

I turned to findhimwalking slowly toward me.

“Are you trying to kill me, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward?”

I thought at first that Harry was referring to what had passed between us the night before, but then he brought his hand to my face and wiped a tear away with his thumb.

“I take back what I said before about you being an ugly crier,” he murmured. My body, traitor that it was, listed toward his. “You’re ahideouscrier.” His lips slanted upward on one side. “A blight on my tender eyes.”

“Nothing about you is tender,” I said.

“Liar.” Harry let that word hang in the air for a moment. “Ifthis”—the pad of his thumb slowly rid my face of another tear—“is about me…”

“It’s not,” I said.

Harry took me at my word. “In that case, and assuming youdon’twant to talk about it…”

“Good assumption.”

“Care to tell me how horrible I am again?” He arched a brow. That was clearly an invitation. In the light of day, I wasn’t quiteso desperate for the touch of another human being. I didn’tneedhim, the way I had before.

I needed to dance.Every day.I needed tofeel—the way Kaylie had always felt everything. She’d spent a lifetime trying to drag me into the sun, into trouble—and theretroublewas, standing far too close to me.

I knew exactly what my sister would have told me to do.

“I would love to outline your flaws,” I told Harry, emphasizing each and every word. “In detail.”

Something flashed in his eyes, white-hot and hard to describe.

“But,” I continued, “I have to go to work, and you have to make it back to the shack—without stumbling this time, even once.”

“Always the taskmaster,” Harry drawled.

I inhaled, then exhaled, then inhaled again. “No regrets.”

Chapter 33

I made it through my entire shift without seeing my mother. I wondered if she’d checked out—and if so, if she’d done it against medical advice. I wondered what her prognosis was.

I wondered how much time I’d bought myself.

And I decided: The day I got Toby Hawthorne out of Rockaway Watch, I was leaving, too—notwithhim. I hadn’t completely lost my senses, and I wasn’t that naive. The secondHarryfound out who he really was, the second I tipped his billionaire father’s men off about his location, he would be gone.

The two of us would, in all likelihood, never see each other again. He would go on his way, and I would go on mine.

Soon—but not yet. He wasn’t ready yet. We had time.

I came back to the shack under the cover of darkness that night knowing that I had the next two days off, knowing that I wasn’t going to leave until I had to.