Page 74 of The Same Backward as Forward

Time exists for me because she does.Iexist because she does.

“The pain getting better or worse?” Jackson asks.

“Worse.”

“You planning to die on us?” Jackson knows that I’m not healing right. He knows I’m deteriorating. And yet, I cannot help taking his question another way. I look past him—to meds that, taken in a high enough dose, would be lethal.

“That night,” Jackson says quietly. “You were going for the pills.”

“That wasn’t a question.”

He makes it one. “How many of them were you going to take?”

Like Hannah, I am a liar. But I do not lie this time. “All of them.”Panic and pain, darkness, despair.

Jackson walks over and stares down at me, his gaze steady and not nearly as hard as I expected. “If you die,” he says quietly, “she will feel like she failed you.”

I can feel puzzle piece after puzzle piece click into place. It’s clear from his tone that Hannah already feels like she has failed someone. Her people are dangerous. They want me dead. They think I already am, and if they knew I wasn’t—

My thoughts begin to tangle, but I know this much: Hannah the Same Backward as Forward is 100 percent the kind of person to risk everything for someone she despises. And somehow, her grief and rage and guilt are all tied up in me.

“I’m going to ask you again,” Jackson says, his voice low. “You going to hurt that girl?”

It is the question he started with. It is, in many ways, the only question that matters. “No.” This time, I don’t even look at the bottle of pills on the counter.

I will not be another reason for shadows in her eyes.

I will not be another invisible scar that marks her.

I do notgetto die.

Jackson sets my piece of paper down on the mattress beside me. “Good.”

Chapter 10

Days pass, and I don’t even feel real—except when her hand is on my cheek.

Except when I can hear her voice.

Except when I fold the piece of paper Jackson gave me into an intricate little cube, a message to her hidden inside.

EVERYTHING HURTS. DOESN’T IT?

There is such a thing as whole-body pain, the kind you feel on the cellular level, as if there is no part of you, no matter how small, that can escape it.

“I’ve got you, son.” Jackson is beside me,rightbeside me. He puts meds in my mouth, and I take them knowing I might as well be swallowing air for all the good they’ll do me now.

Stone walls. Stone ceiling. Stone floor. I’m trapped, and my body won’t stop shaking. My fingers curl into the floor hard enough to turn my knuckles white.

“You did this to yourself,” a voice—thatvoice—says. “You have to find your own way out.”

I retch and retch. There is nothing in me. I am hollow, but I cannot stop retching. If I could just throw up, I might be able to concentrate on something other than the nausea.

“I can’t!” The words rip their way out of me. No response. I blink hard, glaring at the walls that have me boxed in, and for the first time, I realize that there is something drawn on the stone.

On the walls and the ceiling and the floor—lines, just a shade darker than the stone. Hundreds of them. Thousands, twisting and turning, nearly invisible.

A maze.