Liam shrugged. “I don’t know. It seemed like a cool idea. I wanted Frank to be my dad instead of my real dad. We didn’t exactly get along.” He shot Hanna an uneasy look. “We still don’t.”
Hanna shifted on the pillow, not wanting to talk about Liam’s father. “I had a lot of imaginary friends, too. My dad and I invented some of them, actually. Like this big owl named Hortense who watched over me when I slept—I was afraid of the dark, afraid of being alone. When I was in fourth grade and had no real friends, my dad used to draw pictures of Hortense on my lunch bag. It was really sweet.” She closed her eyes and pictured her father’s crude, shaky drawings on the brown paper bags. She’d stashed a lot of them in her school binder, looking at them when she felt particularly lonely. But then, in fifth grade, the drawings abruptly stopped. That was about the time her parents started fighting.
“That’s so great that your dad was there for you,” Liam said quietly.
Hanna sniffed. “Well, he used to be.”
“What happened?”
Dot snored in the corner, fast asleep again. The small strip of light under the door was an unwavering yellow. Hanna pictured her father in his king-sized bed downstairs, Isabel next to him. She imagined Kate in her queen bed in the room next to them, a sleeping mask over her eyes. Hanna’s father said there were no guest rooms on their floor, but when Hanna had passed down that hall, she’d noticed a bedroom on the other side of her dad’s, full of Isabel’s quilting supplies. Why hadn’t he put Hanna in that room instead? Didn’t he remember how Hanna used to be afraid of the dark and suffered from bad dreams? Hanna would’ve been mortally embarrassed if he would’ve pointed it out, but it would’ve been nice if he’d offered.
It was sweet that he’d found Cornelius, but was that really enough? It still felt like he was holding her at arm’s length, still considering her separate from his real family.
Hanna looked at Liam, feeling overcome with sadness. “My dad and I used to be really close,” she said, “but then things changed.” She told him how she’d become friends with Ali in the midst of her parents’ divorce, but even being the most popular girl at Rosewood Day didn’t make up for her father leaving. She recounted the mortifying episode in Annapolis when she and Ali first met Kate. “When Kate came along, I never felt good enough,” she sighed. “I always thought my dad liked her better.”
Liam nodded and asked questions, holding Hanna’s hand when she felt like she was about to cry. “Things are a lot better between us now, and I shouldn’t complain,” she said. “But I just wish I could go back to when my dad and I were tight. The thing is, that time I want to go back to? I wasn’t happy. I might have been popular, but I was still fat and ugly and ruthlessly teased by my best friend. So would I really want to go back to that? It’s like I’m pining for this time that doesn’t exist.”
Liam sighed. “I pine for the time when my parents got along.”
“I’m so sorry about everything that happened between them,” Hanna whispered. “That must be so hard.”
A faraway look swept over Liam’s face. He sighed deeply and took Hanna’s hands. “You’re the only positive thing in my life right now. Promise me we’ll never let anything come between us. And promise me you’ll tell me everything. I don’t want there to be any secrets between us.”
“Of course.” A niggling thought poked the back of Hanna’s brain. She certainly hadn’t told Liam everything—not yet. He didn’t know about New A. Or Kelsey. Or Tabitha.
The dorm room from her dream swirled in her mind, fresh and vivid. On the night Spencer had summoned her to Penn, the drive from Rosewood to Philly had been a blur. Hanna parked where Spencer instructed her to and found the propped-open entrance without any trouble. No one stopped her when she punched in the key code to Kelsey’s room. No one said anything when the latch clicked and she slipped inside. Hanna had removed the pills from her pocket and shoved them under Kelsey’s pillow, then changed her mind and pushed them into an empty bedside drawer instead. She was out of the room again a half minute later. Two minutes after that, she was on the phone to the police, telling them exactly what Spencer had wanted her to say.
The guilt hadn’t hit her until she was driving home and passed a cop on the side of the highway administering a drunk-driving test to two kids. One of them looked a little like Kelsey, with gingery hair and thin, compact legs. Suddenly, Hanna imagined what the real Kelsey was probably going through that very moment, all because of Hanna. Didn’t Hanna have enough to feel guilty for from Jamaica? Should she pull over, call the cops, and tell them she’d made a mistake?
Hanna breathed in sharply now. If she had told the cops it was a mistake, would A—Kelsey—be haunting them now? Maybe they deserved New A’s wrath. Maybe they’d brought this on themselves.