The Hawthorne Legacy (The Inheritance Games #2)(72)

What now?



It was hard to read Toby’s words without feeling a wealth of emotion. My whole life, my mom had never been involved with anyone but Ricky. I’d never seen anyone adore her the way she deserved to be adored. It took me longer to focus on the implications of the words. Toby had been injured—badly enough that he wasn’t sure if he would walk again, and my mother had cursed at him?

I thought about what the old man had said in his letter to Zara and Skye, about a fisherman pulling Toby from the water. How badly had he been injured? And where had my mother come in?

My mind spinning, I read on. Another postcard and then another, and I realized that, yes, my mom had been there, in Rockaway Watch, in the wake of the fire.


Dear Hannah, the same backward as forward,

Last night, I dreamed of drowning, and I woke up with your name on my lips. You were so quiet in those early days. Do you remember that? When you couldn’t stand to look at me. Wouldn’t speak to me. You hated me. I felt it, and I was awful to you. I didn’t know who I was or what I’d done. I remembered nothing of my life or the island. But still, I was horrid. Withdrawal was a beast, but I was worse. And you were there, and I know now that I didn’t deserve a damn thing from you. But you changed my bandages. You held me down. You touched me, more gently than I could ever deserve.

Knowing what I know now, I don’t know how you did it. I should have drowned. I should have burned. My lips should never have touched yours, but for the rest of my life, Hannah, O Hannah—I will feel every kiss. Feel your touch when I was halfway dead and wholly rotten and you loved me despite myself.



“He lost his memory.” I looked up at Libby. “Toby. Jameson and I thought that he might have had amnesia—there was a hint to that in Tobias Hawthorne’s old will. But this letter confirms it. When he met my mom, he was hurt and in withdrawal—probably from some kind of drug—and he didn’t know who he was.”

Or what he’d done. I thought about the fire. About Hawthorne Island and the three people who hadn’t survived it. Had my mom been from Rockaway Watch? Or another nearby town?

More postcards, more messages. One after the other, without answers.


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?”