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

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      “Yeah, and it was the tenth anniversary of your best friend going missing! He could cut you some slack.”

      I couldn’t argue with her there and she soon arrived at her L stop, so we hung up, Serena promising to call me later, and getting me to promise to call our younger sister, Cordy, even though we both knew I wouldn’t. The room felt colder, and I felt older the moment her voice left it. As I started to think about what the day actually meant—about Nora having been gone for ten years, about ten years of limbo, living in purgatory, not knowing where she was or whether she was alive—I also felt the old familiar weight begin to grow. It started in my chest, always, a boulder I couldn’t budge, a wall I couldn’t climb over or knock down. Trying to ignore it, and my phone still in my hand, I did what I did most mornings and began trawling through Instagram, anaesthetizing myself with photos of coffee, home décor tips and puppies. Should I have been doing something more profound on the morning of the official anniversary of my best friend going missing? Maybe.

      It wasn’t enough though, not nearly a big enough distraction, and so I started to wonder what Nora’s family were doing, whether they would mark the day in some way, or if they felt the day before had been enough. There was no grave to visit, not for Nora. Without a body Nora had never been buried but she still left her mark. She was their mark and she was my mark. Maybe we all have them, I don’t know. Maybe I just got mine a little earlier in life than usual. But she was. She was my mark. Indelible. Permanent. Ineradicable. In some ways I was thankful for the constancy of it; I knew she’d never be fully gone as long as I was still here. Maybe that was why the pane of glass I dreamt of every night and could feel slipping from my hands almost every morning kept haunting me; because, in some ways, I didn’t want to wake up to anything else because the moment I did I’d know she was truly gone.

      So, I lay in bed and imagined the Altmans slowly waking up, getting dressed and gathering for breakfast. I could see them walking down the staircase that was still gazed down upon by dozens of photos of Nora; I could see them settling down at the large table in the kitchen, coffee smells trailing through the house, snow falling outside the window just as it was falling outside mine. More likely, Noelle and Noah were getting themselves ready for school while Nate packed up to head home to Texas. Jonathan had probably already left for work, and Katherine would still be in bed, staring as blankly up at her ceiling as I had when I first woke up.

      I couldn’t have known that Noelle wasn’t there, that Nate was the first to realize, that he tapped gently at his mother’s bedroom door, had to shake her to get her attention and ask where his younger sister was. That when he rang Elle’s phone it went straight to voicemail and a bubble of panic began to build somewhere near his duodenum, and Noah looked on, his wide brown eyes taking everything in. That Nate rang his dad next who was on his way to his law practice in Madison, where he spent most of the week, and that Jonathan couldn’t pick up because he hadn’t set up his hands free that morning because he didn’t want to speak to anyone that day at least not yet. That eventually Nate rang Elle’s girlfriend, Jenna, who said she hadn’t seen her since Saturday, and then finally he rang his buddy, Leo, who was already at the scene and suddenly that bubble of panic popped except it turned into a tidal wave rather than disappearing into air and he had to struggle to keep up with what Leo was saying because it couldn’t possibly be true.

      It might have been around that time that my own phone rang again, Ange’s name popping up on my screen. She told me she’d be over to pick me up in an hour to take me back to Madison, and I pushed my covers off, body aching, limbs too heavy, preparing myself for a shower.

      I suddenly couldn’t wait to get back to Madison, not because there was anything waiting for me there, but because waking up in that house, in the exact same spot I’d woken up ten years before, only to hear the news that Nora was missing, had too much poetic symmetry for me to handle at any one moment. My teenage bedroom rang with her memory, every inch of that room simply sang with her presence, low and clear, piercing; there was nowhere I could look that didn’t bear some trace of her. Perhaps I should have relished that. Especially on that morning. But really all I wanted was to get away from it all. I didn’t need to have the memory of Nora screaming at me from every wall and every corner to remember her any better, to miss her anymore than I already did. I wanted to hide somewhere deep and dark where Nora had never been, and do my very best to leapfrog over that day. But that was never going to be a possibility. Not that day.

      I showered and dressed in the same clothes I’d been wearing the day before for no reason other than when I’d packed to go home I hadn’t been able to think beyond the memorial. Mom had already left for work by the time I made it down to the kitchen, and my dad, who was a retired school principal—my high school principal, in fact—was sat in the breakfast nook drinking coffee. The familiarity of my family home, the sight of Dad reading the newspaper, the muffled light of the kitchen as snow crowded the window pane, crouched over me as it always did when I was back there: Here was my home, a reluctant sanctuary, and yet I did not feel safe. I never did.

      “Morning, Mads,” Dad said, glancing up from the paper as I wandered past to help myself to coffee and maybe even a bowl of cereal.

      “Morning.”

      “When are you heading back?”

      “Soon. Ange will be over to pick me up in an hour or so.”

      Dad nodded, sipping at his coffee as I leaned back against the kitchen counter and took a long drag from my mug.

      “When are you planning to take your car in to get fixed?”

      “I can’t afford it,” I said shrugging, “not right now anyway.”

      “We can lend you the money.”

      “It’s fine, Dad. I just need to save a little money and I’ll get it done.”

      “But how will you get around until then?”

      “I can just get the bus, it’s not the end of the world.”

      Dad looked out the window at the snow and then back at me, an eyebrow raised in skepticism. “You can borrow the Explorer if you want? I don’t use it so much anymore anyway.”

      I shook my head. “Dad, if I left you without a car you’d basically be stranded whenever Mom left the house. It’s fine, don’t worry about it.”

      “But the bus—”

      “Is a perfectly legitimate form of public transportation.”

      “Okay, okay, I get it. I’ll back off.”

      “Thank you.”

      There was a slight pause while Dad weighed out his words and said: “You know your mom and I are always happy to—” his voice trailed off but his words still managed to fill the room, unspoken yet heard loud and clear.

      I’d lost count of the number of times we’d had this conversation. It wasn’t always that exact conversation, of course; it wasn’t always about my broken-down, practically worthless VW. Sometimes it was about rent or my meds, occasionally about the cost of therapy and health insurance. It was always there, the helping hand, perennially extended out towards me along with the tendrils of guilt that inevitably accompanied it whenever I took it. But guilt pounded its way through my life, relentless and as all-encompassing as rain in a summer storm, regardless of whether I accepted the help that was offered me.

      “I know, Dad.” I said at last.

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