Forget Me Not: A gripping, heart-wrenching thriller full of emotion and twists!

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We hugged and her body felt small in my arms even as she pulled quickly away.

“Oh, you know. Not great.”

I don’t why I kept asking people how they were, to be honest. I hated that question even on a good day, let alone that day.

I nodded and slid my gaze towards Leo, who raised his eyebrows at me and asked: “How long are you in town for, Mads?”

“I have to get back tomorrow.”

“How you finding being back in Madison? You’re doing a PhD, right?”

Yet another question I dreaded even more than “how are you doing?”

I coughed through my coffee and shook my head. “No. I quit, actually. A while ago. I’m working in the communications department now. At the university.”

“Oh. How’s that going?”

“It’s fine. It has its moments.”

“Sure,” Leo said nodding, polite, polite, “well, it’s a job, right?”

I looked at him, trying to decipher his words but he just smiled, nice and easy, his face wide open.

“They all have their moments. Last call out we got was to save Mr. Hetherington from himself. He’d locked himself out of his house and decided it was best to just sleep off whatever he’d drunk in his car, but the neighbors were worried about him, so they called us. Probably almost died of hypothermia, but what are you gonna do, that’s the job, right?”

It would have been too generous to describe Hetherington as the town drunk. He was simply a guy who got drunk and happened to live in town. I wondered at what Leo was complaining about though. You become a cop in a small town, and what else do you expect from life except fishing drunks out of ditches and pushing cars out of snow drifts? Apart from a former classmate who’d been missing for ten years, of course. It took me a while to realize that he was throwing me a tentative bone. I wasn’t where I’d expected to be in my life, but there had been days, hell, there had been months and years, where getting to even where I was then would have looked like something close to a miracle. And when it came down to it, none of us were really where we had expected to be.

I returned Leo’s smile, or at least tried to and said: “Well, you’ll be running the place soon though, right?”

Leo rolled his eyes towards the other side of the room where his father, Patrick Moody, stood, replete in his chief of police uniform, too big for this room. “Yeah, just as soon as the boss retires.”

“Hey,” I said to Elle, grabbing at her bicep, “is Jenna here? I haven’t met her yet.”

Elle shook her head. “No, she couldn’t make it.”

“That’s a shame.” Talking to Elle felt like talking through a mask or as though I was trying on another character. I tried so much harder around her than anyone else. Not because I wanted her to like me or anything, but being around her made me act the way everyone else seemed to act around me. Drawing me out, pushing for information, wide concerned eyes, forced cheer; I went the whole nine yards with Elle even as I knew how much she must have been hating it. I couldn’t help it though, the blanket of concern that overwhelmed me whenever I saw her. I so desperately wanted her to be okay, even while I came to accept the fact I never would be. Hypocrisy doesn’t always come from a bad place, just a confused one.

My efforts normally paid off with Elle though. It would be a stretch to describe her as bubbly and I hate the word vivacious, but her infectious energy was hard to ignore normally. She’d been all of seven when Nora disappeared and, in some ways, I think her youth had shielded her from the worst of it. Sometimes I wonder if it would have been easier—better—if it had happened when we were all younger. Or older. There’s something about seventeen, those soft teenage years when you think you’re made of sterner stuff but are really still filled with cotton wool. It imprinted itself so hard, so firmly into and on to me because I was so malleable, so yielding. At seventeen you think you’re done, fully formed; but really you’ve barely even got started. It was like a handprint in wet concrete pushed in at just the right moment and then made permanent.

“You talking about Jenna Fairfax?” Leo asked, and Elle nodded.

“How do you know Jenna?” I asked.

“I’ve been coaching the hockey team for a while now. Me and Bright. Fairfax is one of our best players. On the girls’ team, I mean.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Of course.”

“Elle’s getting pretty good too these days. Most elegant player on the ice what with all that figure skating,” Leo said.

Elle’s face seemed to pale even further, and her lips pulled back in a grimace as if she was about to speak before she stopped herself.

“Elle, you OK?” I asked.

“Actually I’m feeling a little sick. I might go upstairs and lie down.”

“Okay,” I said, watching as she placed her glass of water on the coffee table and pushed through the crowd to the staircase.

“She’s taking this pretty hard, huh?” Leo said.

“I don’t know. Maybe she’s really just not feeling well.”

“What about you?”

“You’d think I’d be used to it by now,” I said.

“It’s a rough thing to have to get used to, Mads.”

I shook my head, not disagreeing with him, just trying to shake something loose. To get to the root of what made it all feel so disturbingly empty. “It’s just not getting any easier. Sometimes I wish we’d stop with all the commemorations and memorials. It’s not like any of us have to be reminded, right? It’s like we’re trying to prove something, but what are we proving? Look around, there’s what, sixteen, seventeen people here?” I was talking in a strained rush, my voice low and jagged, and Leo had to step towards me to hear properly. “What good does this do any of us? All I see is us getting older and Nora staying the same.”

Leo’s brow was furrowed as he leaned over me, his hand stretching out to rest warmly on my shoulder; but someone behind me spoke before Leo had a chance to answer.

“You can go home whenever you want, Mads. No one’s keeping you from leaving,” Nate said, his voice stripped of emotion, warmth.

My hands tightened around my mug of coffee which had started to go cold. “That’s not what I meant. I want to be here; I just wish we didn’t have to be.”

“That’s not what I heard.”

“Well, maybe you shouldn’t have been eavesdropping.”

Nate’s jaw clenched as his gaze shifted almost imperceptibly so that he was now staring just to the left of my face.

“All I’m saying is, I wish one goodbye was enough. Or I wish we even got a goodbye. But we don’t even get that luxury, so we have to keep saying goodbye over and over and over again and it just feels less and less real the more that time passes,” I said in a rush.

“It’s been ten years. You think we should have just ignored that? Why’d you even come if you were so violently opposed to the idea of a ten-year memorial?”

“I’m not ‘violently opposed.’ I’m tired I guess. I’m just really, really tired.”

“Well, then I’d suggest you go home and get some rest, Mads. Get some beauty sleep.”

I couldn’t remember when or why things had got so bad between me and Nate. One day he was the person I called when I couldn’t call anyone else, and the next—well, I couldn’t even tell you. He’d simply stopped returning my calls and eventually I’d stopped making them. But he’d never spoken to me like that, with such open hostility I could feel it pounding off him, such shortness that his words threw me so much I literally stepped backwards and onto Leo’s foot.

But Nate didn’t stick around to hear my response, even if I’d been able to somehow stumble across one; he simply slipped past me and into the crowd, joining his mother in the kitchen.

It could have been a concerned comment, I suppose, something sincere and almost loving, “go home, get some sleep.” But it wasn’t and the sudden realization of how little he thought of me then roared in my ears, drowning out everything else.

It took me a while to realize Leo was talking to me, saying something soothing but ultimately meaningless: How difficult this was for Nate, how he’d been having a hard time, how difficult today was for everyone. I didn’t need Leo to tell me any of that; I knew it all already, implicitly. It was in evidence everywhere you looked in that room, and it lived inside me that day just as it did every day, but casual cruelty had never been a part of my relationship with Nate, had never formed an integral part of our language. If our silences had no give to them anymore, then neither did our words. They were brittle, ready to break at the slightest of touches.

I tried to think back to when Nate was the person I rang in the middle of the night, to when his voice was the only thing I could bear to listen to. Just like everything else then it felt so long ago, a lifetime ago. It had been years since I’d seen his name flash across the screen of my phone and, just as with Nora, my relationship to him had gradually been reduced to snowy memorials, stuffy rooms, and stilted small talk.

I took a sip of coffee, while Leo talked at me, and balked at its temperature. Depositing the mug on the coffee table I made my excuses to Leo and headed towards Ange, who was standing on the edge of a conversation between a variety of parents, not joining in. Her eyes were glazed as she drank her coffee and she failed to notice me as I approached.

“Hey,” I said, shaking her out of her reverie, “when are you heading off?”

Ange looked at me and shrugged. “Probably in twenty minutes or so, I guess?”

“No, I mean when are you heading back home to Madison?”

“Oh, not till tomorrow morning. I’m meant to be having dinner with my parents tonight.”

“I can still drive back with you, right?”

“Yeah, of course. So, have you talked to Nate yet? How’s he doing?”

“He told me I should go home to catch up on my beauty sleep,” I said while reaching for Ange’s coffee cup and taking a sip.

“Wow. How caring of him. When did you guys last speak?”

“Last year’s memorial, I guess? Definitely haven’t heard from him since then. I’m trying to work out what I did to offend him so badly, but I think it might just be my very presence.” I tried to make my voice sound light, indifferent, but failed. The truth was, I really was trying to figure out what I’d done, where it had all gone so horribly wrong.

Ange made a face at me, grabbing back her coffee. “You know that’s not it.”

“Do I? We’re not exactly friends anymore. If we ever were.”

“You’re friends. Don’t overanalyze this, it’s just a weird day.”

“Yeah, I know. I’d say something trite, like ‘can you believe it’s been ten years?’ but mostly I just feel old. And tired.”

“You know what I keep doing? I keep looking at Noah and thinking that he was a baby when she went missing. That’s what I can’t believe. That his entire life has been the same length of time as Nora being gone.”

I looked around for Noah, unable to find him, and wondered if he’d gone upstairs to join his sister. He’d been almost a year old when Nora disappeared. He had no memory of her except the one we’d built for him in her absence, and I wondered what that looked like. What that could possibly look like. We’d spent the past ten years of our lives at events like this, memorializing someone we loved, someone we missed, but for Noah this had effectively become his life. He had no memories that weren’t connected to, and hijacked by, Nora’s disappearance. At the very least I could look back to when she wasn’t gone, but for Noah, it was all he’d ever known. I thought back to the day he was born, and realized his birthday was coming up. February 14th.

***

Nora’s pissed because the birth of her baby brother is ruining her Valentine’s Day plans, so we’re lying on the couch in her parents’ living room, illegally eating marshmallows. “I don’t know what they think they’re doing,” she says, widening her eyes at me, “having a baby at their age. It’s gross. Plus, you just know this is a save-the-marriage baby. It’s so obvious.”

“That’s not fair, your parents always seem pretty happy to me. And your mom’s not that old,” I say, but Nora’s eyes just get wider.

“Oh, really? You know the doctor said Mom had a geriatric womb?”

Nora starts laughing, and I can’t help joining her, throwing a marshmallow at her head at the same time. But she catches it easily, popping it in her mouth and starting to chew while saying: “She said she almost stabbed him with a scalpel or whatever.”

“That sounds about right.”

“Yeah, as soon as I reach, like, fifty, I’m gonna start carrying a knife around to threaten people who call me ‘old’ with. No one will be able to arrest me though. I’ll just be the eccentric, kinda scary old lady.”

“It’s the perfect plan.”

“Right? I’ll get away with so much.”

Elle comes into the room then, complaining about being hungry, and Nora holds out her arms to her, beckoning her to the couch. She hops up to join us, snuggling up in between us, and Nora starts to feed her marshmallows, daring Elle to keep her mouth open while she attempts to toss them in there. “You excited to meet your baby brother, smelly head?” she asks, and Elle scowls, her face a picture of cartoonish displeasure. She is not excited to meet her younger brother. Nora pulls her onto her lap, squeezing tight and says: “You know I wasn’t excited to meet you either,” which makes Elle turn her head towards her older sister in shock. “Yeah, I thought you were going to ruin everything for me because I loved being the baby and I loved being the center of attention. But then I met you, and you were just the coolest, even though you cried, like, all the time, plus you thought I was awesome, which made me feel awesome, and now you’re my best friend.”

“I thought Maddie was your best friend,” Elle says, looking over at me suspiciously.

“Well, sure. But you’re my other best friend.”

Elle doesn’t look all that convinced, but I smile at her and she slowly takes another marshmallow from the bag and begins to chew thoughtfully on it.

Their parents hadn’t arrived back with Noah until much later, and Katherine had wanted to let Elle stay sleeping, but Nora had crept into her room and woken her. I could still see the look of sleepy awe she had on her face when she gazed down at the baby. I wondered if Elle remembered that day at all; she’d been six, so it was plausible that she did, but I knew that I’d had to fight so hard to remember Nora any other way than being gone that sometimes those memories of her being here felt too far out of reach even for me.

“Have you spoken to Louden yet?” Ange asked, cutting through my memories.

I shook my head. Louden Winters was Nora’s ex and the brother of one of our high school friends, Hale, who hadn’t made it to the memorial but had sent a vast bunch of lilies in her place. We’d all been friends at one point, more than friends really. A group of mismatched friends and siblings who’d grown up together from scraped knees and training wheels right through to tequila shots and heads hanging over the toilet bowl. I’d once been as close to Hale as I was to Ange; but then Louden had been named as a suspect in Nora’s disappearance and for some reason Hale hadn’t taken too well to me accusing him of killing our friend. I’d been trying to ignore Louden’s presence altogether, pretending he wasn’t there, but he was six foot three, taller than most everyone else there and it had been getting harder and harder to ignore the fact that I hadn’t even said hello.

“When did you last see him?” Ange asked.

“A couple of years ago at Christmas I think. At the bar. You were there.”

Ange nodded. “Right, yeah. You really haven’t seen him since?”

“No. Have you?” I asked, unable to keep the trace of suspicion that licked through me then out of my voice.

Ange swallowed a mouthful of coffee and nodded. “Yeah, I was in Chicago for a couple of days last year, remember? I went for a drink with him and Hale.”

I raised my eyebrows, looking between Ange and Louden. “Why?”

Ange shrugged. “Why not?”

I stayed staring at Louden for longer than I meant to, trying to arrange my thoughts in a way that made sense, jigsaw pieces scrambling to find their mate and failing. I knew what I wanted to say: because he might have killed our best friend, and it was almost there, rising higher and higher in my chest until I pushed it down, away, saving it for myself. I wasn’t allowed to say such things anymore.

It had been okay for a while, at least, the wild accusations and rampant theories. Louden’s arrest had come just days after Nora went missing, one of the main suspects, but he’d provided an alibi and been released without charge. It hadn’t stopped my own suspicions of course, and neither had it stalled the small-town gossip, but all these years later there was something childish about those words, an intense naiveté that I wasn’t allowed to indulge in anymore. They were words from another life, another lifetime, the one right after she went missing. Nevertheless, cold sweat pricked at my skin all of a sudden, the airless room stuffy with bodies, my own body still cold from the world outside as Louden turned towards me, feeling my stare, liquid brown eyes catching light. He lifted his chin in my direction and I let out a heavy breath before turning back to Ange.

“What did he have to say for himself?” I asked, my attempt at small talk still managing to sound like an accusation.

“The usual. He’d just started seeing someone, but I don’t know if it stuck.”

“Lucky her.”

“Mads,” Ange said, warning lacing her voice.

“What? All I’m saying is he’s a bad boyfriend, that’s all.”

“That was over ten years ago. People change.”

It was something I wanted to believe, desperately, that people change. And maybe I did believe it, just with certain caveats; that change was glacial, imperceptible, and when it did come it didn’t necessarily mean anyone had changed for the better. It seemed to me as though it was the world that kept changing, often with a loud, deafening crack as life tore itself apart, and we were all left struggling to keep up. Not all of us managed to. I was testament to that; I was still struggling to keep up with the thundercrack that had torn through our lives ten years earlier and led us all there, to that room on a snowy day.

As I stood there, just waiting for the day to end, waiting for that heavy, empty feeling to lessen just slightly, even though I knew it wouldn’t, that it probably never would, I couldn’t possibly have known that another crack was coming, waiting to tear us all apart yet again. That less than twenty-four hours later, Noelle would be dead, and I would be left once again, breathless, desperate, trying to make sense of a world that seemed determined to leave me behind, too broken and battered to even try and catch up.