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When 17-year-old Arbor Hayes' best friend turns up alive after a mysterious six-month disappearance, she must piece together the fragments of her story to make sense of what happened. But as clues e...
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When my eyes meet Jordan's, a tingle of adrenaline blasts over my scalp.
All those months Emma was missing were some of the worst of my life; even worse than after what happened with my father. When I fired that gun, things could have ended so much differently. My father could have been killed. When Emma disappeared, we didn't know what happened. And after her truck turned up several weeks later, we were told to prepare ourselves for the worst.
Emma was likely dead—that's what the police said—and their plan to bring home a missing teenager became a search for her body.
But then she reappeared, very much alive, and along with her came an entire story that solved exactly nothing. The only evidence police have is the reappearance of her missing tennis shoe.
But does that prove anything?
Now that I know about priZm and Mizz Marigold, it does raise some doubts. This Stefanie girl is supposedly the great love of Emma's life, the one she's destined to be with no matter how her family feels. Still, the question I can't escape is ... why would she go through all this trouble?
"I have a theory," Jordan says, yanking me out of my head. "What if Emma took off with Mizz Marigold but things didn't work out the way she'd hoped? So, she decided to come back home and staged the kidnapping so her parents wouldn't know what actually happened?"
"But that farmer found her truck in April. If she'd abandoned it to trick her parents, where was she the rest of the time?"
Jordan's quiet for a beat. "Maybe she was waiting it out in the woods? If she wanted everyone to believe she was kidnapped, she'd have to make it look real, right? I mean, that's what I would do."
I bring my feet up on the seat and hug my knees to my chest, turning her suggestions over in my head. "It seems like a lot to pull off, and it's not like Emma's some mastermind criminal. She's just a small-town girl from Ohio with next to no real-life experience. The extent of her street smarts is when she aced the STD test in health."
"What other choice did she have?" Jordan asks, arching a mangled eyebrow. A cut slices through the center and an ugly purplish bruise takes up the entire side of her face. It's painful to look at, and my insides wince every time my eyes linger too long.
Jordan must sense me staring. She combs her fingers through her curls and positions them over her eye. "Emma talked a lot about her parents and how terrified she was that they'd find out. This is the kind of desperate move she'd make if it meant keeping her secrets. Plus," she adds, her eyes drifting from mine, "sometimes you do crazy things when you're in love."
A knot tightens in my chest. That last statement makes me think Jordan's speaking from experience, but I'm not about to ask her to clarify what she means. Her relationship with Emma is obviously a touchy subject, and to be honest, whatever happened between the two of them is none of my business. What I do know is, Jordan knows a side of Emma I've never seen. If she thinks Emma is capable of pulling off an alleged kidnapping, who am I to argue?
