The Heartbeat Hypothesis

by Lindsey Frydman

  He gave me the kind of grin that likely got him out of all kinds of trouble. “No.”

  I dug my keys out of my purse. “Then you don’t get an answer, either.”

  Micah stepped in front of me as I started for the door. “You think something happened to Emily—something other than the story everyone believes.”

  A chill tingled across my neck. “What?”

  “I overheard you. Talking to Molly and Dana.”

  “You mean you were eavesdropping?”

  “If you want to call it that.”

  “Fine.” I sidestepped him, clutching my keys tighter.

  “Wait.” Micah’s fingers gripped my elbow, halting my escape. “You didn’t let me finish.”

  “What?” I pulled away from his grasp but didn’t continue toward the door.

  “I don’t believe that bullshit story, either,” he whispered, bringing his face close to mine.

  “You don’t?” The cold chill itched its way down my spine and froze my feet to the floor. “Then…what do you think?”

  He looked away, shaking his head. “Hell if I know.”

  Disappointment sat heavy in my stomach. “Then why don’t you believe the story?”

  Micah’s blue eyes widened like he’d expected me to drop the subject. He ran a hand up the back of his neck, shaking his head slowly. “I know she didn’t— She wouldn’t do that.”

  I chewed on my lower lip, trying to force the puzzle pieces together. “You and Emily…”

  His lips parted, and he looked away, but not before I saw panic flash across his features, confirming my theory.

  “You were together,” I said. “That’s why you and Jake don’t talk, isn’t it?”

  Micah lifted his head, and the panic was replaced with something unnamable. When he spoke, regret dripped from every word. “Yeah… So like I said, I know Emily wouldn’t have done it.”

  His words echoed Jake’s. They both believed wholeheartedly that she couldn’t have done something so devastatingly tragic. Molly and Dana believed Emily had been happy.

  I had to believe they were all right. And that only left one conclusion.

  Her parents lied.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I hadn’t thought this through. It was intentional—my lack of thought. Because if I’d considered the options, weighed out what might happen, I’d have decided this was a bad idea. But this was the only option left.

  I’d caught up to Dana on the way out of the church. Told her I lost the Cavanaughs address and wanted to stop by and say hi, keeping the lie about being related to Emily. She gave me a funny look, like why do you want to talk to them, but she hadn’t questioned it. She believed I was “family.”

  I knocked on the Cavanaugh’s door and waited. Blood pumped violently through my ears while I wondered about the people who lived there. I’d never met Jake’s parents, but a part of my soul already despised them.

  One breath. Two. Three breaths. Four.

  A wave of nausea hit me, and I squeezed my eyes shut. I was about to puke all over the Cavanaughs’ porch. One hell of a greeting.

  Shit, at least it’d be honest.

  The door opened slowly, and a woman appeared. Her short blond hair was shoved into an almost-ponytail, and her eyes were wide as she blinked curiously at me.

  “Hi. Mrs. Cavanaugh?”

  “Yes.” Her eyes searched the scenery behind me, as if waiting for a guy with a huge check to pop out from behind a bush.

  “My name is Audra. I’m a…a friend of Jake’s.”

  “Jake?” Her features collapsed in on themselves for the briefest of moments, and she looked a decade older. The smile reappeared as fast as it had gone. “He hasn’t lived here in a few years, since he left for school.”

  Right.

  “Ah.” I swiveled around, looking for what held the woman’s attention. Seeing nothing, I turned back to her, sliding my purse strap higher on my shoulder. “Actually…my name is Audra Madison.”

  I waited for recognition or understanding—or anything. But Mrs. Cavanaugh’s face remained as still as a statue.

  My fingers tingled in anticipation as I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. Oh God, what if she regretted ever writing that letter to me? Sure, the Cavanaughs agreed to exchange personal contact information with me through the donation agency, but we’d never agreed to meet. Showing up here was probably against some sort of rule. What if she—

  “Would you like to come in for a minute?”

  I let out my breath. A light-headedness clouded my vision. “I don’t mean to bother you.”

  “Please. I’ll take all the company I can get.” She smiled, but since I’d become something of a fake-smile detector lately, I saw the lie in the forced curve of her lips.

  I thought of what Jake said, about his mother being ill. “You know who I am?”

  “Of course.” She moved swiftly through the spacious living room, leaving me to either stand in the doorway or come inside.

  I fingered my bracelet and stepped forward, fighting off the swarm of dizziness. Nausea roiled in my gut. There was still a better-than-average chance I’d ruin the spotless floor with the contents of my stomach.

  “Have a seat. Please. Would you like something to drink?”

  I found a seat on the long white couch, observing the spotless appearance of the house. “No, thank you.” Everything was so bright—white and yellows everywhere, like they wanted their interior space to scream sunshine! The furnishings were simple and every surface wiped clean. These were the kind of floors you could literally eat off of.

  She sat on the matching love seat, clutching her hands against her waist.

  I licked my lips, sat back, and tried to get comfortable—which was impossible. Sitting back was too casual. Sitting forward was too aggressive. Sitting there at all was dizzying to my senses.

  Mrs. Cavanaugh tore her gaze from the wall. “You said you were friends with Jake?” Her voice was soft and far away.

  “Yeah, I…I go to school at Colorado State. We…” The words lodged in my throat, and I rubbed my fingers across the clock tattoo, forcing myself to breathe.

  This was a bad idea.

  I shouldn’t be here.

  I swallowed, pressing my palms together.

  The way she smiled and then hid it away, like displaying it was a mistake, reminded me of Jake.

  “How is he doing?”

  Who was I to tell her—when he’d chosen not to speak to them?

  But she was sitting right in front of me, and she looked so damn sad when she said his name.

  “He’s good,” I whispered. But the small talk wasn’t going to work. We had nothing in common to talk about besides Jake and the letter she’d sent me—and I didn’t want to talk about either.

  She clasped and unclasped her palms. Her eyes grew empty and unfocused.

  Pressing a palm to my chest, I started counting. One breath. Two. Three breaths. Four. The room’s bright colors warped and blurred together. I blinked, clearing the haze. “I was hoping…” That maybe you’d tell me what really happened to Emily.

  As if that was going to happen.

  “I thought it’d be nice if I could know a little more about Emily. I went to her memorial service today. But…” I put on a smile—one as real as hers. “I came here to say thank you. For answering my letter.”

  Mrs. Cavanaugh looked away. Up and over, down and back. Finally, she parted her thin lips. A phone rang in another room, the shrill tone unreasonably loud. Her spine straightened. “Excuse me. I need to see who that is. I’ll only be a moment.”

  I nodded and watched her hurry out of the room. For a single second, I’d seen the real Mrs. Cavanaugh. Not the well-put-together woman wearing lies on her face, but the grief-stricken mother with empty, hollowed eyes.

  The longer I sat, the more my skin crawled. The house was beautiful. A few rooms short of a mansion. But it was a purely decorated house, not a collected one. Like an interior desig
ner had been paid a pretty penny.

  Most families with two kids would have pictures along the walls or on the mantel. I spotted only one framed image tucked back in the corner of a shelf. If I’d had something better to do than inspect the living room, I would’ve never seen it.

  A standard family portrait. All phony, forced smiles. Maybe that was why there was only one. Their lips turned up into perfect displays of happiness, but their eyes—they were all wrong.

  Jake had said it was easy to fake it for a photograph.

  Looked like that wasn’t true for this family.

  I eyed the door, wondering if I could make a mad dash to my car and get out of there before Mrs. Cavanaugh came back. Listening for the sound of footsteps, I stood. The change in elevation threw my balance off. I pressed two fingers to my temple, and before I could make the short trip to the door, she silently rounded the corner.

  “Sorry about that.” She smiled—more reminders of Jake. Lips partially pulled up, like the effort to do so was all she could manage.

  “No. Don’t be. I should get going. I don’t want to keep you.” And I didn’t want to make an ass out of myself. Not a bigger ass, anyway.

  “When I read that letter you sent us, it reminded me so much of Emily.”

  I froze, unable to move my feet from the tile beneath them. If I did, the entire world would’ve come shattering down.

  “You were both so young. But not only that. Your letter simply…sounded like her.”

  Another onslaught of nausea rolled through me violently. Light-headedness threatened to send me crashing to the floor. I couldn’t stand in front of her any longer. Not without completely losing it.

  “Thank you,” I said. “For the letter. And for seeing me today.” Uninvited.

  I couldn’t get outside fast enough, couldn’t get enough of the fresh air. My hasty exit verged on rude, but all I could think was don’t cry, don’t scream, and don’t faint.

  And once I was in my car, I only did the first.

  I drove away from the picture-perfect house and all its secrets, ashamed I’d come in the first place.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  As days passed by, the information—or lack thereof—ate away at my clarity. What had I been thinking, and who was I to go around bringing up the past, digging through secrets everyone else had long ago forgotten?

  Wrong became a constant state of being, and I clung so desperately to my belief that I was only trying to do the right thing.

  The dorms were nearly deserted. Everyone was out at one of the fifty Halloween parties raging on and off campus. I’d almost forgotten about the holiday altogether. It was Kat’s favorite. She loved dressing up and making a big show of it. She’d dress sexy. I’d aim for funny. She’d encourage me to show my cleavage, and I’d tell her all those Cokes had officially fried her brain. It was our yearly tradition.

  Now that she wasn’t here babbling on and on about costumes, makeup, and parties, I had no desire to celebrate.

  I’d begun to dread the weekends, because I didn’t have enough things to do to fill up all that time. So by Friday afternoon, I’d already completed my homework for all of next week. Fucking pathetic.

  Jake hadn’t responded to my last text—the one I sent hours ago. When six o’clock rolled around, boredom took over, and all I could do was stare at my phone. Waiting.

  Annoyed at myself, I climbed off my bed and put on shoes. I needed out. Jake’s place was only a fifteen-minute walk, and if he wasn’t home, it was still an excuse to leave my dorm.

  But Jake was home.

  “Hey.” I stumbled backward, wholly unprepared to see him. “I texted you earlier.”

  “Yeah, I know.” He rubbed under his jaw, averting his gaze. “Sorry. I was planning to text you back, but my mom called. I got sidetracked dealing with that shit. You want to come in?”

  I stepped inside, and he let the door shut.

  “Your mom called?” Heat flooded my cheeks and tingled the backs of my ears.

  “Yeah. She told me one of Emily’s friends stopped by today.”

  I swallowed thickly. Cleared my throat. Sucked in air. None of that helped quell the roaring in my head or the thumping in my heart. It had been days since I’d knocked on his parents’ door, so his mom wasn’t referring to me. “She did?”

  “Yeah…I couldn’t understand half of what she said. Just that Dana came over. Something about Emily… I don’t know.” He shook his head, glancing up at the ceiling. “I asked if she was taking her meds. Said she was.” But he didn’t believe her, based on the sideways frown he wore. “She’s hard to understand when she gets to rambling and crying.”

  I blew out the fiery air from my lungs and pressed my palms against my jeans, wondering if Dana had asked any of the questions I couldn’t. Was my growing list of lies coming back to bite me? “Is everything okay?”

  He stood inches away from me, yet he was somewhere else.

  “Jake?”

  After a moment, his eyes refocused on mine. “Good as it ever was. You want to go do something?”

  He was evading the subject—but I didn’t want to talk about his mom, either. If she’d outed me as a fraud, Jake didn’t know it. Yet. “Sure. I’d like that.”

  Of all the strange and random things on Emily’s done-it list, this one seemed the most out of place. Handling a deadly weapon didn’t fit with rainbows, and pie-smashing, and hair dye.

  The slick grayish-silver metal sparkled in the sunlight. Just looking at it made my heart pump faster.

  “Uh. So. Not to sound like a girl or whatever, but I don’t know the first thing about what…what to do with that.”

  Jake chuckled, pulling the gun out of its protective box. “Don’t worry. I’ll teach you.”

  I’d never been up close and personal with a gun before, so being at a firing range was like a monkey tango dancing with the queen of England. Out of fucking place.

  With the earplugs in, everything sounded fuzzy, like it does underwater. I still understood what Jake said, but the effect left me slightly off-kilter. A shot went off two rows past us. The sound seemed to echo in the distance forever.

  Jake ran through the basic rules of gun safety. One: always treat a gun as if it’s loaded. Two: don’t point a gun at something you don’t intend to shoot and aren’t willing to kill. Easy enough.

  I watched him fire a magazine of bullets at the target out in the distance, wiping my palms against my jeans. A pointless gesture. The sweat kept coming back.

  “I don’t know,” I said when he asked me if I wanted to try. “I’m…scared. I think.”

  He gave me an easy smile, like he understood. “If Emily could do it, you can do it, too. There’s nothing to be scared of. You’re the one with the loaded weapon. And you’re only aiming it at a piece of paper.”

  I tried to laugh, but it only made me more nervous. “Uh. What if it backfires? Guns do that, right?”

  “Only if you don’t clean them. And even then, the chances of that are rare.”

  I stared at the metal could-be-killing machine, unconvinced. “Rare is not the same as impossible.”

  Jake laid the gun on the small wooden table in front of us and turned, dipping his head close to mine. “I promise it’s not going to backfire on you.”

  I switched my attention from the gun to his face, half hidden in shadow. The other half, lit with the falling sun, smiled, and the lines near his eyes crinkled.

  “You can’t promise me something like that.”

  A burly-looking guy—with a contradictory ponytail—shot something much bigger than Jake’s handgun. The sound was new. Like an explosion that was only getting started. My body twitched, and I fumbled back.

  He put one hand on my shoulder. “I can. You’ll be fine. I swear. And you might even like it.”

  I eyed the guy’s handheld cannon again. It made me squirm to look at it, but I couldn’t stop looking, even though Jake was talking to me, touching me, and I was supposed to be paying atte
ntion to him.

  “Um.” I couldn’t force my eyes away, and my hands started to shake.

  Jake’s hand moved down my shoulder and down my forearm, and then he slowly intertwined his fingers in mine. My heart fluttered, but his gesture was calming somehow.

  “I would never tell you to do something that would hurt you. Do you trust me?”

  One hell of a question.

  I didn’t need the thirty seconds it took me to respond. I knew my answer as soon as he’d asked. But it took all of those thirty seconds to accept that trusting him would mean firing that gun, proving him right.

  “Yes. I trust you,” I conceded, and a thousand violent butterflies exploded in my stomach. He deserved my trust. He’d proven himself trustworthy. Me, on the other hand? Not so much. I squeezed his fingers, shoving those thoughts away. “I’ll shoot the stupid gun. But…I want to watch you do it one more time.”

  He grinned, seemingly satisfied. “I can get behind that deal.” Then he kissed me once, softly against my forehead.

  I closed my eyes and exhaled louder than I meant to, my skin tingling where he’d touched it. I focused on that while he reloaded the pistol, and I stared at the subtle muscles snaking around his forearms and biceps. Anything to get my mind off a backfire that would melt my face.

  It was working, too.

  The proper gunfiring stance looked good on him. Easy and casual. Unassumingly dangerous. He fired off ten more rounds. When he finished, the place where the bull’s-eye had once been was now a singular hole—thanks to the ten bullets that had ripped it open.

  I didn’t know which was more impressive: his no-holds-barred smile or his aiming skills. “How’d you get to be so good? You’re seriously good.”

  I couldn’t hear his laughter, but I saw it on his face and in the tilt of his head. “Just like everything else. Practice.”

  “Oh, whatever. That’s your answer for everything.”

  “Practice is the answer to a lot of your questions.”

  Maybe he had a point.

  Jake nodded down the field, toward the target. “We’ll change the paper, and then it’s your turn.”

  The hyperventilating was back. I tried to slow my breaths, steady the fierce beating of my heart. But Jake returned from replacing the target, and all my procrastination time was up. I nodded, mostly to convince myself I was ready.