Page 96 of The Same Backward as Forward

“People who cross my family end up dead,” Hannah says, her tone oddly flat.

“Drugs?” I already know the answer to that question, suspected it long before she told me anything about her family at all. I also know that I am an addict. Given those two things, I know what Occam would say about this whole situation, but a deeper instinct in me refuses the simplest explanation for how I ended up in the position to cross her family. “But with me… it’s not business.”

I don’t want to be saying this, but I told herdealer’s choice. I put the ball in her court, and I will not be the one to close a door that she has opened.

“It’s personal,” I conclude.The way you hated me from the moment I opened my eyes—it was personal.

“That wasn’t a question,” Hannah tells me, and there’s something in her voice that makes me feel like the two of us are sitting in a field of landmines, like the slightest shift or a gust of wind could blow us to pieces.

But one thing about Hannah: She’s not the type to fear the wind.

Chapter 26

If our first night in the lighthouse was hunger and need and our second was about taking our time, about little moments and aching in all the right ways,this—the two of us on the beach, talking as she works on breaking my code—israw. It is a different kind of intimacy, secrets and shames exchanged under the light of the moon.

She tells me that when she was nine years old, she witnessed her mother throw a bleeding man to vicious, starving dogs.

I tell her that I know deep down that I’m running from something. It’s the closest I can come to telling her about my dreams.

Eventually, Hannah solves my puzzle, and the way she looks at me when she does makes me think:No regrets.

“I read the poem.” Hannah’s eyes cheat down for just a moment, then swing back up to mine.Brown and blue and gray and green.“The one you quoted to me, weeks ago. ‘A Poison Tree’ by William Blake.”

The name William Blake hits me like dirt beneath my fingernails, like the sudden realization that the thing I’m holding in my hand is a bone.

“Say that again.” I’m standing closer to Hannah than I was a moment ago, even though I don’t remember taking a single step toward her.

“‘A Poison—’”

“The poet’s name,” I say, my voice low and almost desperate.

“William Blake.” Hannah stares at me, and I look back at the rings of color in her eyes, counting them, naming them, barely holding on to the here and now.

William Blake.

William Blake.

William Blake.

“It’s right there.” I can’t stop myself from saying the words, no matter how much I might want to. “Just out of reach.”

For so long, my life has been a blank slate—except for Hannah, except for my dreams. I have come to know myself the way another person might come to know a stranger, moment by moment and day by day, going with my gut, drawing inferences about who I am and what I’m capable of.

And right now my gut says:Don’t.

“What is?” Hannah’s voice breaks through the fog that I can feel descending on my mind. She’s asking mewhatis just out of reach.

“Something.”I turn away from her, but I answer, words pulled from fog—or possibly the abyss.“The tree is poison, don’t you see? It poisoned S and Z and me.”

“What does that mean?” Hannah asks me.“The tree is poison.”

“I don’t know.” I think about a word—a single word.Complicit.

“SandZ.” Hannah’s voice is steady, quiet in that distinctly Hannah kind of way that somehow makes her even more impossible to ignore. “You have sisters. One named Skye, one named Zara.”

I get a brief flash with each name.A diamond. A rose.Sounds echo through my mind: laughter and piano music and someone ordering me in a fond, exasperated tone to brush my hair.

“Did I love them?” I don’t know why I would expect Hannah to be able to answer that question. “My sisters. Did I love them the way that you love Kaylie?”