Chapter 30
JAMESON
Toby’s story began with a stack of postcards. The last time Jameson had seen them, Avery had been wrapping those postcards in plain brown paper, a Christmas gift that Jameson had fully expected Toby to reject, but Avery could out-stubborn almost any Hawthorne when she put her mind to it.
“Your postcards to Hannah,” Jameson said quietly, staring at the stack Toby had placed on the coffee table between them. “And hers to you.”
Toby’s missives had been written in invisible ink. Hannah’s had not. Before Avery had given both sets of postcards to Toby last Christmas, they’d been among her most precious possessions, one of the only things she had of her mother’s.
“When I heard about Avery, I went straight to Washington state.” Toby’s green eyes stayed locked on the postcards as he spoke. “I was determined to find a place I’d been only once, a container yard off an isolated port. My mother saved my life in a sterile room, embedded in a slightly larger room inside of one of those containers. I found the port and the container yard, but nothing I could use—no records, no leads,no trace of that particular container, nothing at all. So I threw myself into translating a book that a child once handed me in the streets of Seoul.”
“What does any of this have to do with Hannah?” Jameson asked. Toby had said that Avery’s mother was the one who sent him here, but Hannah was dead. She’d been dead for five years.
Then again, Alice wasdead, too.
When Toby didn’t respond to Jameson’s question, Xander offered up one of his own. “What kind of book?”
“A tome of Eastern European folklore. Fairy tales. Said book was handed to me with a message inside—a program from Hannah’s funeral, delivered to me shortly after her death. I’ve long thought my mother or someone like her might have been the one who sent it.”
“And you didn’t translate it until now?” Jameson demanded.
“There was no reason to before. After a few hours with nothing to show for it, I could feel myself starting to spiral, so I took out the postcards.” Toby reached forward and divided them into two stacks on the coffee table. His gaze lingered on the first stack. “I read the ones Hannah wrote to me about Avery in an attempt to ground myself. Avery’s first steps. Her first word. The first and only time she ever got suspended from school.” Toby’s lips tilted slightly upward. “Fourth grade. Personally, I found her behavior to be totally justified.”
“You said that Hannah sent you here.” Jameson couldn’t let himself linger on the thought of Avery—not now. “Was there a message of some sort, coded into one of her postcards?”
“Not in one of Hannah’s to me.” Toby slowly moved his hand to the other stack, then peeled the postcard off the top. The picture on the back was Buckingham Palace.
“London,” Jameson said. He’d seen Avery reading that exact postcard before, more than once. He flipped it over, to the seemingly blank back. “Invisible ink. This was one of yours to Hannah.”
“That’s the thing.” Toby produced a black light and shined it on the card, turning invisible writing visible in an instant. “Thisisn’tone of mine. I didn’t write it. I think Hannah did. I think she wrote this andhid the postcard among the others I’d sent her. I can’t blame Avery for not noticing. Her mother did my writing very well, butthis, the moment described on this postcard, it never happened.”
Jameson read the message, then read it again.
Dear Hannah, the same backward as forward,
Do you remember that time on the beach? When I didn’t know if I would ever walk again, and you cursed at me until I did? It sounded like you’d never cursed before in your life, but oh, how you meant it. And when I took that step and swore right back at you, do you remember what you said?
“That’s one step,” you spat. “What now?”
You were backlit, and the sun was sinking into the horizon, and for the first time in weeks, it felt like my heart had finally remembered how to beat.
What now?
“In my mind, I always capitalized her name—Hannah the Same Backward as Forward, no comma.” Toby’s natural rasp deepened. “I could never let myself write it that way, though—not after I remembered the fire, remembered what I’d done. I wanted to be with Hannah more than I will ever want anything or anyone, but for the longest time, I couldn’t even let myself really write her name.”
“This postcard.” Jameson’s voice was still much calmer than it should have been as he tried to bring Toby back to the present. “What makes you think Avery’s mother wrote it?”
“Who else would know my handwriting this well?”
“And you never read it before? Never even looked at it?”
“I read Hannah’s cards to me,” Toby said quietly. “But I never…” He shook his head.
Never, until Avery was missing and you started to spiral.Jameson took a good look at Toby’s pupils. “You haven’t slept, either.”
“I have years of practice not sleeping. Look at the writing, Jameson. You’ll see it.”
The writing looked like Toby’s—exactly like it, a distinct mix of print and cursive.
