Dear Hannah, the same backward as forward,
Ever since the island, I’m terrified of water, but I keep forcing myself onto ships. I know that you would tell me that I don’t need to, but I do. Fear is good for me. I remember all too well what it was like when I had none.
If I had met you then, would your touch have broken through to me? Would you have hated me until you loved me? If we’d met in a different time, under different circumstances, would I still dream of you every night—and wonder if you dream of me?
I should let you go. When everything came crashing back, when I realized what you’d been hiding from me, I promised that I would. Promised myself. Promised you.
Promised Kaylie.
The name stopped me dead in my tracks. Kaylie Rooney. The local who’d died on Hawthorne Island. The girl on whom Tobias Hawthorne had pinned much of the blame in the press. I scoured the rest of the postcards, all of them, looking for something that would tell me what exactly to make of Toby’s words, and finally—finally—I found it, near the end of a message that started off with a much dreamier tone.
I know that I will never see you again, Hannah. That I don’t deserve to. I know that you will never read a word I write, and because you will never read this, I know that I can say what you forbade me to say long ago.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry, Hannah, O Hannah. I’m sorry for leaving in the dead of night. I’m sorry for letting you love me even a fraction as much as I will, to the day I die, love you. I’m sorry for what I did. For the fire.
And I will never stop being sorry about your sister.
CHAPTER 70
Sister. That word echoed in my mind over and over again. Sister. Sister. Sister. “Toby told my mom—told Hannah—that he was sorry about her sister.” Thoughts crashed into one another in my brain, like a ten-car pileup, the cacophony deafening. “And in another postcard, he mentioned Kaylie. Kaylie Rooney—she’s the girl who died in the fire on Hawthorne Island. Sometime after that, my mom helped nurse Toby back to life. He didn’t remember what had happened, but he said that she hated him. She must have known.”
“Known what?” Libby asked, reminding me that I wasn’t just talking to myself.
I thought about the fire, the buried police report, Sheffield Grayson saying that Toby had purchased accelerant. “That Toby was responsible for her sister’s death.”
The next thing I knew, I had my laptop out, and I was doing yet another internet search on Kaylie Rooney. At first I didn’t find anything I hadn’t already seen, but then I started adding search terms. I tried sister and got nothing. I tried family, and I found the one and only interview with a member of the Rooney family. It wasn’t much of an interview. All the reporter had gotten out of Kaylie’s mother was, and I quote, My Kaylie was a good girl, and those rich bastards killed her. But there was also a picture. A photograph of… my grandmother? I tried to wrap my mind around that possibility. Then I heard the door open behind me.
Max poked her head into the room. “I come in peace.” She squeezed by the door and strolled past Oren. “For the record, I’m armed only with sarcasm.” Max ended her stroll right next to me and hopped up on the desk. “What are we doing?”
“Looking at a picture of my grandmother.” Saying the words made them feel just a little bit more real. “My mom’s mom. Maybe.”
Max stared at the picture. “Not maybe,” she said. “She even looks like your mom.”
The woman in the picture was scowling. I’d never seen my mom scowl. She had her hair pulled into a tight bun, and my mom always wore hers loose. Twenty years ago, this woman had looked decades older than my mom had when she died.
But still, Max was right. Their features were the same.
“How has no one made this connection?” Max asked incredulously. “With all the rumors about your mom, and people trying to find a connection between you and the Hawthornes, no one thought to look at the family of a girl they pretty much murdered? And what about your mom’s relatives and the people who knew her growing up? Someone must have recognized her, once you made the news. Why hasn’t anyone tipped off the press?”
I thought about Eli, selling me out for a payday. What kind of town was Rockaway Watch that no one would have done the same?
“I don’t know,” I told Max. “But I do know that whatever Tobias Hawthorne left in that safe-deposit box—that police report, his investigators’ files—I want to see it all. I need to see it. Now.”