Heartbeat
We just look at each other, and I don’t care that he’s gorgeous and screwed up. I care that he really gets what’s going on. Sees it.Sees me.Since her mother's sudden death, Emma’s been, unable to really grieve, because in a way, her mum’s still there - kept ‘alive’ by machines for the sake of the baby growing inside her.And as Emma watches her old life fall apart around her, it sometimes feels like she’s the one who died instead. Like she needs someone to remind her how to breathe.Until she meets Caleb, a boy whose anger and loss could match her own – and who might have the power to make Emma finally feel like her heart’s started beating again. Praise for Elizabeth Scott‘The best love story I’ve read.’ – Sarah Dessen on Something Maybe
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Does life go on when your heart is broken?
Since her mother’s sudden death, Emma has existed in a fog of grief, unable to let go, unable to move forward—because her mother is, in a way, still there. She’s being kept alive on machines for the sake of the baby growing inside her.
Estranged from her stepfather and letting go of things that no longer seem important—grades, crushes, college plans—Emma has only her best friend to remind her to breathe. Until she meets a boy with a bad reputation who sparks something in her—Caleb Harrison, whose anger and loss might just match Emma’s own. Feeling her own heart beat again wakes Emma from the grief that has grayed her existence. Is there hope for life after death—and maybe, for love?
To Astrolabe, for over fifteen years
of being a bright and joyful light in my life. I miss you every day.
Contents
1
I sit down with my mother. My smile is shaky as I tell her about my day.
“I think I did okay on my History test,” I say. “Oh, and Olivia wore her new pair of false eyelashes, the ones I told you about. She was batting them around so much that a teacher stopped and asked if she had something caught in her eyes.”
I laugh at the memory, and the sound is shaky too. “Olivia wasn’t super happy about that.”
There’s the slightest movement, but it’s not on Mom’s face. Her face never changes. But under the skin of Mom’s stomach...I don’t want to look but I can’t help it, because there my mother’s skin is moving.
Because the baby is moving.
I close my eyes.
When I open them, Mom’s stomach is stretched out and still.
“Emma, are you ready to go?” Dan says as he comes into the room, and I look up at him and nod.
“Did you two have a nice chat?” he says, bending over to kiss Mom.
I stare at him.
He must feel it because he straightens up, clearing his throat, and pats Mom’s stomach. “Look how big he’s getting. Lisa, he’s growing so much.”
Mom doesn’t say anything, not even to that.
She can’t.
She’s dead. Machines are keeping her alive. They breathe for her. They feed her. They regulate her whole body.
My mother is dead, but Dan is keeping her alive because of the baby.
2
Dan and I don’t talk on the ride home. As soon as I’m inside the house I head straight up to my room, and I lock the door.
I never used to have a lock, but then, I used to have Mom. I used to think that Dan cared about what I thought. What I wanted. What Mom would have wanted. This way, all the talks he used to try to have, right after Mom first died, can’t happen. Or at least, he can talk, but I don’t have to see him and can put on music or headphones or even fingers in my ears to shut him out. Just like he shut me out.
I don’t have one of those wussy little turn-and-click locks. I have an actual lock, a bar with a padlock that I snap shut.
Closing out the world.
I put it in myself the day Dan told me what he was going to do to Mom. I walked out of the hospital, went to the hardware store and came home and put in the lock. My mother taught me how to do that. She believed women should know how to fix things. I’d seen her fix a broken toilet and watched her change the element in our hot water heater. She installed new locks on our doors when I was seven, after Olivia’s family got robbed.
I go over to my window and open it. On the roof, Olivia grins at me through her blond hair and then comes over and pushes herself inside.
“How did you know I was out there?”
“I saw your hair when we came in. Also, your car down the road. Thanks for not parking...here.”
“It makes things easier,” she says. “And clearly, I need a wig. Oooh, I could get a bunch. Red hair, blue hair—”
“That wouldn’t stand out at all.”
She sticks her tongue out at me. “I’d get other ones too. Brown hair, black hair. I could be a spy, don’t you think?”
“Spies have to use computers, Olivia.”
“No, they don’t. They go on missions. They have tech people do the computer stuff for them.”
“Someone’s been watching Covert Ops.”
“Like you don’t watch it too. You know you love it. You and your mom both think Sebastian is...” She trails off.
“Sebastian is cute,” I say, and try not to think about how Mom and I used to watch the show together. “But he’s also fictional, plus even spies on TV have to use earpieces and stuff—would you be willing to do that?”
“For Sebastian I would,” she says, grinning, and then flops on my bed. “But I really wish I could be an old-fashioned spy. Like back when they had to write coded messages in invisible ink and speak a dozen languages.”
