Page 53 of The Same Backward as Forward

He was mine.

“You don’t get die on me,” I said, my voice low and fierce. “You don’t get to make melove youand then destroy yourself.”

He looked me right in the eyes. “You don’t love me. You can’t. I killed her.”

“It was an accident.” I’d never said those words before. He shook his head, and I said them again.“It was an accident, Toby.”

“You hated me.” He understood now, so many things he hadn’t before, and I heard it in his voice: If it wasn’t this cliff, it would be another.

“I hated you until I loved you,” I said. “And I’ll love you until the end.”

This wasn’t the end. I wouldn’tlet itbe the end of him or me orus.

“So whatever you’re thinking right now,” I told him ferociously, my voice shaking, my body threatening to do the same, “get it out of your mind. I have lost enough, Toby. I am not going to lose you, too.Do you understand me?”

Did he? Did he understand that I didn’t know how to breathe without him anymore? I’d spent weeks knowing that I was going to lose him—but not like this, not when we’d been so close toeverything.

Once upon a time…

Far, far away…

“Promise me.” I did to him what Kaylie had done to me in my dream, because what choice did he have except to make this promise? I’d lived with the reality of his role in my sister’s death for months, but it was brand-new to him.

There was nothing he would deny me right now.

“Promise me,” I said again, “that you will live.”Promise me, you bastard.

He promised.

Chapter 38

We didn’t leave that night, the way I’d intended for us to, the way weneededto. Instead, Harry walked wordlessly back to Jackson’s shack. Jackson was gone when we got there. I wondered where he was. I wondered if he’d heard us.

We’d been shouting, Toby and me. There’d been wind.

“If you want to go back,” I said, once Toby and I were inside the shack, alone, “now that you know who you are, if you want to stop running—I understand.”

“Is that what you think this is?” Toby stopped right next to the loose floorboard, the one we’d avoided in all those rounds of The Boards On The Floor Game. “You think,” he continued tersely, “that now that I know who I am, who my father is, I want to goback?”

“I don’t know,” I whispered.

Toby looked at me like looking at mehurt. “I meant what I said before,Hannah, O Hannah. Every word of it.This—you, me—it’s the only thing that’s real. It is the only thing that matters to me. If I could snap my fingers and make my last name anything other than Hawthorne, I would.” He closed his eyes. “If I could take it all back—”

The fire. Kaylie. All of it.

“I’m a murderer.”

“You’re not,” I insisted, closing the space between us. “You didn’t start the fire. You never lit a single match. None of you did. And Toby? I don’t think you would have, not unless you knew for afactthat everyone was clear of the flames.”

Kerosene. Lightning.A tragedy in two words.

“I’m the reason your sister is dead, Hannah. She’s your lost one, andI’m the reason you lost her.” He was almost shaking now. “I have to turn myself in.”

I swore at him, every single curse word I knew. “They’ll kill you. Do you understand that? My family willkill you, and you promised me that you would live.”

I grabbed him by the shoulders, trying tomakehim look at me, but he closed his eyes, and when he finally opened them again, he fell to his knees in front of me, his head bowed.

Toby Hawthorne knelt at my feet, like a sinner in confession. He stayed there, his body shuddering, refusing to let me touch him, and then he lifted the loose floorboard. He reached into the hole and locked his hand around the metal token.