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

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.