The Evolution of Mara Dyer

63

NOAH LEANED BACK IN DR. KELLS’S CHAIR and watched me. I was still in his lap.

And suddenly self-conscious. “What?” I asked as I blushed.

“Are you all right?”

I nodded.

“You sure?”

I thought about it, about what was in my file and what it meant. “Not entirely,” I said. Not being believed about Jude would always hurt. Noah’s arms tightened around me, solid and warm.

“You can read it,” I decided.

He shook his head, his hair tickling my skin. “I showed you mine with no expectations. You don’t have to show me yours.”

I looked up at him. “I want to.”

Noah’s hand wandered over the folder on the desk behind my back, and then he leaned back in the chair to read with me still in his lap.

We were silent. His fingers wandered beneath my T-shirt, drawing invisible pictures on my skin. Distracting me, I realized with a smile. I was grateful.

Then he said my name, bringing me back. “Mara, did you see this?”

I leaned over to look. Noah flipped the file around so I could read it. Under my stats, the ones I’d skimmed, there was a handwritten notation beneath a section called CONTRAINDICATIONS that read:

Sarin, orig. carrier; contraindication suspected, unknown; midazolam administered

My heartbeat thrummed in my ears. “Sarin. My mother’s maiden name.”

My grandmother’s last name.

I wasn’t sure if Noah heard me. He handed me the file and shifted me up, off of his lap. He was up in an instant.

The rush of blood was loud in my ears. “What does it—what’s a contraindication?”

“It’s like,” Noah started to say as he began opening drawers. “It’s like if you have a penicillin allergy, the contraindication is penicillin,” he said. “You shouldn’t take it unless the benefit outweighs the risk.”

“Like a weakness?” I asked. “What’s midazolam?”

“They use it at the clinic,” Noah said, thumbing through file folders. “They never told you they were giving it to you?”

“Wait, what clinic? The animal clinic?” I asked, my eyes widening.

“Most veterinary drugs started as human drugs, not the other way around. If it’s what I think it is, they use it for sedation, presurgery.”

“Why would I need to be sedated?” The idea made me shiver.

Noah shook his head. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Unless there’s a human indication I’m unaware of, which is possible.” He glanced at the clock. “They’re going to start waking up soon,” he said. He was silhouetted in the dark. “You look for Phoebe’s file, I’ll look for Stella’s.”

I looked without words because I couldn’t find any, not then. I kept searching, careful as I could be not to disturb anything as I tunneled through file cabinets and scoured the desk drawers. In the bottom-right one, on top of a pile of papers, I found something. But not what I had been looking for.

I withdrew the fine black cord with the silver pendants—mirror images, mine and his—that should have been hanging around Noah’s neck.

“Noah,” I said. “Your necklace.”

He turned to me, placing a manila file folder on the desk. Benicia, the label read—Stella’s last name.

I handed Noah the necklace and he fastened it around his neck. Then helped me search for Phoebe’s file.

I opened every drawer, looked under every pile of paper. There were a bunch of notebooks all stacked on a shelf—I looked between those, too, taking each one out and flipping through it—maybe her records had been stuffed inside?

He slid into Dr. Kells’s chair then. “Keep looking,” he told me, as he turned on the computer monitor on her desk. I willed myself to hold it together despite the panic that scratched below the surface, and resumed the physical search as Noah began an electronic one.

And then, just as my eyes found a notebook with Phoebe’s scrawl on the front, I heard Noah say my name in the most haunted voice I had ever heard.

His skin was pale, illuminated by the monitor’s light, which flickered over his face as he watched something on the screen, utterly riveted. I gripped Phoebe’s notebook and moved next to him to see what it was.

What I saw, framed in the glossy white monitor, was us.

An extremely high quality video on Dr. Kells’s computer screen of me on my bed. In my bedroom. At home. Of Noah straddled in my desk chair, looking at me. Talking to me.

I saw his artful smirk. My answering smile.

And a date in the corner, where a counter ticked.

It was filmed last week.

Noah did something, clicked on something, and I watched in horror as our on-screen selves appeared and disappeared in fast motion as seconds, minutes, hours of footage passed.

Noah clicked again and a window opened up, containing more files with more dates. He opened them in rapid succession and we saw my kitchen. Daniel’s bedroom. The guest bedroom.

Every room in my whole house.

Another click. The sound of Noah’s voice reached out from the speakers and out from the past.

“I won’t let Jude hurt you.”

Noah inhaled sharply. He fast-forwarded again and we watched his lean frame disappear. We watched me speed in and out of my bedroom, and then finally change and get ready for bed. And then we watched Jude walk into my bedroom that night. Watched him watch me as I slept.

Jude had hurt me, again and again and again. Noah blamed himself because he wasn’t there, but it wasn’t his fault. He was just as lost as I was, just as blind in this as me.

Dr. Kells wasn’t blind, though. She saw it all. She saw everything.

“She knew he was alive,” I said, my voice sounding dead. “She knew he was alive the whole time.”