The Hawthorne Legacy (The Inheritance Games #2)(78)

The door opened. “That family always finds out,” Jackson Currie grunted. Over the phone, I hadn’t realized just how big he was. He had to have been at least six foot six, and he was built like one of Oren’s men.

“Is that why my mom changed her name?” I asked him. “Is that why she ran?”

The fisherman stared at me for a moment, his expression hard as rocks. “You don’t look much like Hannah,” he grunted. For one terrifying moment, I thought he might slam the door in my face. “Except for the eyes.”

With that, he let the door swing the rest of the way inward, and Oren, Grayson, and I followed him inside.

“Just the girl,” Jackson Currie growled without ever turning around.

I knew Oren was going to argue. “Please,” I told him. “Oren, please.”

“I’ll stay in the doorway.” Oren’s voice was like steel. “She stays in my sight at all times. You don’t come closer than three feet to her.”

I expected Jackson Currie to balk at all of that, but instead he nodded. “I like him,” he told me, then he issued another order. “The boy stays outside, too.”

The boy. As in Grayson. He didn’t like stepping back from me, but he did it. I turned for just a moment to watch him go.

“That the way it is?” Currie asked me, like he’d seen something in that moment that I hadn’t meant to show.

I turned back to him. “Please, just tell me about my mother.”

“Not much to tell,” he said. “She used to come check on me now and then. Always nagging at me to go to the hospital over every little scrape. She was in school to be a nurse. Wasn’t half-bad at stitches.”

She was in nursing school? That felt like such a mundane thing to be learning about my mother.

“She helped you nurse Toby after you pulled him from the water?” I said.

He nodded. “She did. Can’t say she particularly enjoyed it, but she was always going on about some oath.”

The Hippocratic oath. I dug through my memory and remembered the gist of it. “First do no harm.”

“It was the damnedest thing for a Rooney to say,” Currie grunted. “But Hannah always was the damnedest Rooney.”

The muscles in my throat tightened. “She helped you treat Toby even though she knew who he was. Even though she blamed him for her sister’s death.”

“You telling this story, or am I?”

I went silent, and after a second or two, my silence was rewarded. “She loved her sister, ya know. Always said Kaylie wasn’t like the rest of ’em. Hannah was going to get her out.”

My mom couldn’t have been more than three or four years older than me when all of this had gone down. Kaylie would have been her younger sister. I wanted to cry. At this point, I wasn’t even sure what else to ask, but I pushed on. “How long did Toby stay here after the accident?”

“Three months, give or take. He mostly healed up in that time.”

“And they fell in love.”

There was a long silence. “Hannah always was the damnedest Rooney.”

In other circumstances, it might have been harder for me to understand, but if Toby had been suffering from amnesia, he wouldn’t have known what had happened on the island. He wouldn’t have known about Kaylie—or who she was to my mother.

And my mom had a big heart. She might have hated him at first, but he was a Hawthorne, and I knew all too well that Hawthorne boys had a way about them.

“What happened after three months?” I asked.

“Kid’s memory came back.” Jackson shook his head. “They had a big fight that night. He came damn near close to killing himself, but she wouldn’t let him. He wanted to turn himself in, but she wouldn’t let him do that, either.”

“Why not?” I asked. No matter how in love with him she’d been, Toby was responsible for three deaths. He’d planned to set a fire that night, even if he’d never lit a match.

“How long you think the person who killed Kaylie Rooney would last in any jail hereabouts?” Jackson asked me. “Hannah wanted to run away, just the two of them, but the boy said no. He couldn’t do that to her.”

“Do what to her?” I asked. My mom had ended up running anyway. She’d changed her name. And three years later, there was me.

“Hell if I could make sense of either of ’em,” Jackson Currie muttered. “Here.” He tossed something at my feet. Behind me, Oren twitched, but he didn’t object when I moved forward to pick up the object on the ground. It was wrapped in linen. Unrolling it, I found two things: a letter and a small metal disk, the size of a quarter.

I read the letter. It didn’t take me long to realize that it was the one Toby had mentioned in the postcards.


Dear Hannah, the same backward as forward,

Please don’t hate me—or if you do, hate me for the right reasons. Hate me for being angry and selfish and stupid. Hate me for getting high and deciding that burning the dock wasn’t enough—we had to burn the house to really hit my father where it hurt. Hate me for letting the others play the game with me—for treating it like a game. Hate me for being the one who survived.

But don’t hate me for leaving.

You can tell me over and over again that I never would have struck the match. You can believe that. On good days, maybe I will, too. But three people are still dead because of me. I can’t stay here. I can’t stay with you. I don’t deserve to. I won’t go home, either. I won’t let my father pretend this away.