Page 44 of The Same Backward as Forward

He was getting too close to something I wasn’t sure either one of us could handle.

“That wasn’t a question,” I noted.

“Games are easier than questions for me.Puzzles. Riddles. Codes.” Harry looked down at the alphabet he’d drawn in the sand. “My memory is a blank slate, but there are a surprising number of things I haven’t forgotten. I know how to tie my shoes. I know how to breathe through pain and wrap it in an imaginary iron box in my mind. And I know that there wasn’t anyone who could solvethisbefore you.”

I wasn’t sure, when he saidthis, if he was talking about the code—or himself. All I knew for certain was that the way he said the wordsbefore youmade me think abouthim—his breath on my skin, my breath on his.

Once upon a time, hating him had been the easiest thing in the world.

“The way you wrote the letters is boxy and angled.” I moved my way down the beach, bringing my fingers to touch theU, then theS.

“Drawn only with straight lines,” I continued, “just like they were in Two Moves.”

“And what does that tell you?” Harry challenged.

“It’s all connected.” My answer was automatic, and so was the way thatIstarted drawing in the sand. He’d taken up most of the dry canvas, so I went to where the sand was barely damp and dragged my finger through its surface, writing out the code from our game of hangman by memory.

My lips starting to curve, I wrote the answer above the numbers—UNCOPYRIGHTABLE—and then I turned my attention back to Harry’s alphabet, walking down the beach, all the way to the start.

To the letterA.

I wrote a 3 next to it—the correct digit, based on the code. “A lot of the numbers in the code start with a three,” I noted out loud. I looked back toward the encrypted string of numbers and the word I’d written on top of them. “Only two of them start with a two.”

LandT.

“You see it, don’t you?” Harry asked.

I scowled at him. “Bshouldn’t be seven.”

He shrugged. “Depends on how you draw it.” I looked back to hisB. He’d drawn it with no angles, only parallel and perpendicular lines.

Sevenlines. “Aisthree—it takes three lines to make the letter.B, the absurd way you’ve drawn it, takes seven. If you’d used angled lines, the way you did for theRin our last game, it only would have taken five.”

“Six if you break the long line into two smaller ones.” Harry had absolutely no remorse for playing dirty. “I warned you before: I learned to skew games in my favor from the master.”

That wasn’t what he’d said before, not exactly. My gut said that, whether he knew it or not, he was talking about his father. The billionaire. A person didn’t amass a fortune like that without skewing the game.

“Do you know,” I asked Harry quietly, “who you’re talking about?”

I saw a muscle ripple over his jaw, and for the longest time, he said nothing.

“Your mother never hurt you.” When Harry finally did speak, his voice was perfectly even, perfectly calm, and far too much like my own. “She never had to. That’s what you said last night.”

His reply had been that he thought he might know what that was like.

“When I was nine…” I swallowed and fixed my gaze in the direction of the seemingly endless ocean, dark as the night. “I heard her throw a man to the dogs. They were starving, and he was bleeding. That was the day I realized she kept them hungry and mean for a reason.”

I was fairly certain my mother hadn’t realized that I was at home that night. I’d always been grateful that Kaylie hadn’t been.

“You were right before,” Harry said suddenly, “when you called me a coward.”

I wondered what slivers of memory, what secrets my own had shaken loose in his head.

“I know I was running,” he told me, his voice low. “I just don’t know from what—or who.” His eyes opened and found their way to mine. “I’m coming around to your perspective on hiding. It’s not so bad, being hidden.” He took a step toward me, into damp sand. “I don’t mind being someone’s dirty little secret, as long as it’s yours.”

For the longest time, neither of us said another word, and then I turned back to the letters in the sand, the ones he’d written. Next to theA, I’d already written a3. Next to theB, I wrote a7. AC, when drawn with only straight lines, required three lines, and in the code, the letterChad corresponded to the number thirty-two.

I wrote that in the sand. “Thirty-two,” I said. “As in, three dash two. It’s the second letter written with three lines.”