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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ