The Hawthorne Legacy (The Inheritance Games #2)(79)

Sooner or later, he’ll figure this out. He always does. He’ll come for me, Hannah. He’ll try to make it all better. And if I let him find me, if I let him wag his silver tongue in my ear, I might start to believe him. I might be tempted to let him wash away my sins, the way that only billions can, so you and I can live happily ever after. But you deserve better than that. Your sister deserved better. And I deserve to fade away.

I won’t kill myself. You extracted that promise, and I will keep it. I won’t turn myself in. But we can’t be together. I can’t do that to you. I know you—I know that loving me must hurt you. And I won’t hurt you again.

Leave Rockaway Watch, Hannah. Without Kaylie, there’s nothing holding you here. Change your name. Start anew. You love fairy tales, I know, but I can’t be your happily-ever-after. We can’t stay here in our little castle forever. You have to find a new castle. You have to move on. You have to live, for me.

If you ever need anything, go to Jackson. You know what the circle is worth. You know why. You know everything. You might be the only person on this planet who knows the real me.

Hate me, if you can, for all the reasons I deserve it. But don’t hate me for leaving while you sleep. I knew you wouldn’t let me go, and I cannot bear to say good-bye.

Harry





I looked up from the letter, my ears ringing. “He signed it Harry.”

Jackson tilted his head to the side. “That’s what I called him ’fore I knew his name. It’s what Hannah called him, too.”

Something gave inside me. I closed my eyes and let my head fall, just for a moment. I had no idea what had happened between Toby leaving this shack twenty years ago and my mother’s death. If he was my father, he had to have found her at some point. They had to have been together again, if only once.

“He found me after she died,” I whispered. “He told me his name was Harry.”

“She’s dead?” Jackson Currie stared at me. “Little Hannah?”

I nodded. “Natural causes.” Given the context, that seemed important to clarify. Jackson turned suddenly. A second later, he was rummaging around in the cabinets. He thrust another object at me, coming close enough for our fingertips to brush this time.

“I was supposed to give this to Harry,” he grunted. “If he ever came back. Hannah sent them here, year after year. But if she’s gone—only seems right to give them to you.”

I looked down at the thing he’d just handed me. I was holding another bundle of postcards.





CHAPTER 75


It was one thing to read Toby’s love letters to my mother. It was another entirely to read hers to him. She sounded like herself, so much that I could hear her voice with every single word I read.

She loved him. The muscles in my chest tightened. It hurt to love him, and she loved him anyway. I breathed—in and out. He left her, and she loved him anyway. That string of thoughts cycled through my head on repeat as we drove back to the airstrip where the jets awaited. What my mom and Toby had—it was tragic and messy and all-consuming, and if the postcards made one thing clear, it was that she would have done it all again.

“Are you okay?” Grayson asked beside me, like it was just the two of us in this SUV, like we weren’t surrounded by Oren’s men. There were two other SUVs, one in front of us and one at our rear. There were four armed men, including Oren, in this car alone.

“No,” I told Grayson. “Not really.” My entire life, I’d grown up knowing that I was enough for my mom. She hadn’t dated. She hadn’t wanted or needed a damn thing from Ricky. Her life was full of love. She was full of love—but romance? That wasn’t something she’d needed. It wasn’t something she’d wanted. It wasn’t even something she was open to—and now I knew why.

Because she’d never stopped loving Toby.

Close your eyes, I could hear Max telling me. Picture yourself standing on a cliff overlooking the ocean. The wind is whipping in your hair. The sun is setting. You long, body and soul, for one thing. One person. You hear footsteps behind you. You turn.

Who’s there?

And my answer had been: no one.

But after reading even just a couple of my mom’s postcards? It was getting harder to ignore Grayson’s presence beside me, harder not to think about Jameson. My eyes stung, even though there was zero reason for me to be crying.

I stared through my tears at the postcards my mom had written to Toby and forced myself to keep reading. Soon, the focus of my mom’s writing shifted from what they’d had to a different kind of love story. From that point on, every single postcard was about me.

Avery took her first steps today.

Avery’s first word is “uh-oh!”

Today, Avery invented a game that combines Candy Land, Chutes and Ladders, and checkers.

On and on it went, up until the postcards stopped. Up until she died.

My hand shook, holding the last postcard, and Grayson’s hand made its way to mine.

“She wrote these,” I said, my voice catching in my throat, “to Toby about me.” It couldn’t have been clearer reading them: He really was my father. I’d been working off that assumption for so long that it shouldn’t have come as a shock.

Beside me, Grayson’s phone buzzed. “It’s Jameson,” he said.