Free Last Light by M. Pierce Page A

here was a good thought: Hannah at the cabin with me all weekend. Finally.
    “Great,” I said. “Perfect. I can’t wait…”
    “Me either,” she murmured.
    “I can’t wait, Hannah.” I pressed the point of my pen against the page. Black ink bled out. “You’re home. I’m glad.”
    “Me too. I don’t … want to wait.” Whenever Hannah got embarrassed, which happened often and easily, her voice softened. I grinned and tilted my head. Mm, Hannah’s shy side delighted me. It made me feel like a devil.
    “Let’s not wait. A week is a long time. Do you need to get settled?”
    “Yeah … let me go get Laurence. I might grab a shower, if you don’t mind waiting.”
    “Shave.”
    Hannah took a moment to process my imperative.
    “Oh … yeah, okay. Yeah.”
    I could barely hear her, she spoke so softly.
    “Take your time, Hannah. I’ll wait for your call. I love you.”
    “I love you, too. I won’t be long.”
    We said our good-byes—my good-bye involving anything but the word “good-bye”—and I left the desk and headed toward the bedroom.

 
    Chapter 13
    HANNAH
    The charms I threw over my whole life for.
    I threw over my whole life.
    Hey, I’m kidding.
    I shuffled down the hallway with Laurence’s cage digging at my belly.
    “You’ll be out of here soon,” I said to the rabbit. He slid along the newspaper and scrabbled to stay steady. His eyes were big as quarters.
    I had tried to pay Jamie for watching him—Jamie lived in the condo above mine—but she refused my money. Maybe I could slip a gift card under her door.
    I stroked Laurence’s ears, kissed the top of his head, and set him in his hutch in the living room. He began a full fur clean, the way he always did after I touched him.
    “Hey, I’m not so bad,” I said.
    I changed Laurence’s food and water and dragged my suitcase to the bedroom. God, I didn’t feel like unpacking. I felt tired and greasy after a four-hour flight, and I couldn’t turn off my brain. Seth, Nate, Matt … Seth with his confusing kiss, Nate with his excessive generosity, Matt with his tongue-in-cheek comment … I threw over my whole life.
    I’m kidding, he said. But it was true.
    Matt did throw over his whole life for me.
    His anonymity, his relationship with Bethany, his safe and stable routine—I broke it all apart when I bumbled into his world. My picture and my clumsy mistake started Matt on the path that ended with him risking his life on Longs Peak. And that, I realized with a shudder, was why I agreed to help him fake his death.
    Not just because I loved him.
    Not just because I wanted him to be free.
    Because I felt responsible for his unhappiness.
    And that unhappiness had surrounded Matt, no matter how he tried to hide it. “It’s one thing,” he told me, “to share your life in fiction, on your own terms, and another thing entirely to see your personal history all over the Internet.”
    Sometimes I caught Matt looking very pale as he surfed the Net, and I knew he’d seen another article about his life—about his botched suicide, his dead parents, his old partying habits, and petty crimes. I would hug him then and find his heart beating rapidly under my hand.
    And even after his birthday, when I finally coaxed Matt out of his funk, he lived like a hermit. The condo was his cell. From its windows he watched the city he loved, where he used to move freely, an unknown observer. But that city had turned on Matt with its insatiable twenty-first-century curiosity, and the more Matt hid, the hungrier people got. He was “Denver’s author,” and they were proud and proprietary. His good looks, his wealth, his damaged past, and wild youth became the stuff of tabloids, literally.
    M. Pierce sightings were tweeted.
    Young writers haunted the agency’s steps.
    Pam received a never-ending deluge of mail for Matt. Clothing, food, books, love letters.
    “Wait it out,” I used to tell him. “You’re a fad. This craziness won’t last.”
    But