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October 9 - October 17, 2025
I hate you, Tobias Hawthorne the Second.
I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.
Don’t tell me that you’re sorry for my loss. Don’t ask if I’m okay.
“Let,” he choked out a third time. “Me.” A breath caught in my throat. “Die.”
You don’t get to die, you bastard.
I thought he might pass out again, but no such luck.
If that made me his villain… good.
You wouldn’t be making jokes like that if you knew who I was and what you took from me,
“You can’t just say something like that and leave me hanging, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward.” Watch me,
“There are people who want you dead, and right now, all of them think you already are.” “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me who those people are or why they want to hasten my tragic and inevitable demise?”
“I was angry with my friend; I told my wrath, my wrath did end.” There was something almost musical in Harry’s tone, something dark. “I was angry with my foe: I told it not, my wrath did grow.”
The title of the poem was “A Poison Tree.”
“What are your thoughts,” he asked me loftily, “on scarred men?” “Men?” I gave him a look. “If I see any, I’ll let you know.”
For the first time, I wondered if the billionaire’s son had been running from something. I wondered if he’d had a reason to burn that mansion down.
“I see you, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward. All of you.”
“I have never,” Harry said, following in my tracks, pacing me no matter how much pain it caused him, “been disappointed in you.”
I felt his gaze like the lightest of touches, like the wind that caught my hair, just like in his sketch.
“Sometimes, when I look at you,” Harry said, his voice rougher now, as it echoed through the night, “I feel you, like a hum in my bones, whispering that we are the same.”
And just like that, I woke up.
Don’t you know, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward? I would do anything for you.
“This is real. My life before can stay a bad dream, and you can tell me, Hannah, O Hannah—who made you look like this?”
He was mine.
“I hated you until I loved you,” I said. “And I’ll love you until the end.”
“I deserve you. I deserve to be happy, and you make me happy, you impossible, arrogant, self-destructive, infuriating, brilliant, wonderful son of a bitch.”
Anything is possible when you love someone with no regrets.
That kiss had been good-bye.
You might be the only person on this planet who knows the real me.
“Some people are like the ocean, little Hannah,” Jackson told me, his voice as gruff as ever. “You can’t let or not let them do a damn thing.”
“There’s a difference,” he says in that Texas drawl of his, unhurried and smooth, “between showin’ off and deciding you’re done giving a damn about people who expect you to dim your light so they can feel more like the sun.”
“Don’t you ever apologize for the things you’ve survived.”
“Hawthornes never,” Nash Hawthorne tells my comatose sister, “let go.”
“The best gifts,” Nash said, glancing at Libby, a low, deep hum in his voice, “are the ones you don’t even know you want.”
“What happens in the tree house…,” Grayson said, his voice thick with emotion. “Stays in the tree house,” Xander, Jameson, and Nash finished as one.

