Page 49 of The Same Backward as Forward

I looked away. I’d known from the beginning that each day that Toby Hawthorne was here, Jackson and I were both in danger.

Harry just hadn’t felt likeToby Hawthorneto me for a very long time.

“I need to go back to my apartment,” I said. It was paid up through the end of the month, but I was betting my landlord would start throwing my things away the very next day after that, legalities be damned. There wasn’t much I wanted.

Some clothes.

My important papers.

My emergency stash of cash.

Ideally, I would have taken my car, too, but that would have required coming back after getting Harry to safety, and I didn’t think I could risk it. Better for Hannah Rooney to have disappeared a couple of weeksbeforethe miraculous reappearance of Toby Hawthorne than after.

Jackson grunted at me again, and I thought that was the end of the conversation, but then he proved me wrong. “You always were the damnedest Rooney.”

Chapter 37

I?’d only been back to my apartment once since I stopped going into work, for clothes. If I’d been thinking straight, I would have packed up everything I needed then, but I hadn’t.

Hadn’t been thinking straight.

Hadn’t packed.

I let myself in and got straight to work. Fifteen minutes later, I was almost done. Sixteen minutes in, my front door opened, even though I’d locked it behind me.

“Look what the tide dragged in.” Rory took up nearly the entire doorframe, and I was smart enough to know that was intentional. He wanted me to be keenly, viscerally aware of the difference in our sizes.

He wanted me thinking about the fact that my exit was blocked.

“I don’t know what you mean.” Neutral tone, neutral expression—old habits kicked back in fast.

“Don’t you, Hannah?” Rory’s smile was the furthest thing from comforting. “I’m surprised. Eden’s always saying you’re so smart.”

I thought about the way I’d shown my cousin up that night, when my mother had dragged him here to teach him a lesson.Rory hadn’t known that he’d gotten into a fight with a Hawthorne. I’d figured it out.

I told myself that was all this was. I told myself that he didn’tknow. He couldn’t.

If he’d known what I’d really been up to these past few months, I probably would have been bleeding by now.

“What do you want, Rory?” I said flatly.

“We all thought you skipped town.” He stared at me for a moment, then his expression turned self-congratulatory. “I had someone keeping an eye on this place, just in case.”

“That’s not an answer to my question,” I pointed out. My voice was calm, but on the inside, I was saying every prayer I knew that whoever my cousin had paid to tell him if I came back to my apartment hadn’t realized what direction I’d come from.

Where I’d been.

“What makes you think I’m here to answeryourquestions?” Rory’s beady eyes narrowed. “Where have you been, Hannah?”

I channeled my inner Jackson: “None of your business.”

“That’s what you’ve never understood.” My cousin pointed a finger at me. “Our familyisbusiness. Business is family.” He nodded toward the bag in my hand. “Looks like you’re running away. I have to ask myself why—and what you might know.”

That tipped me off to the fact that he was here on his own behalf, not my mother’s. Maybe he suspected there was something off with her.

Maybe he thought I’d disappeared because I knew what it was.

“You know, Rory,” I said slowly, “you should ask yourself if my mother would want you here.” I nodded toward the scar along his cheekbone. “It’s healed up nicely, by the way.”