The Elements: A Novel

Freya and Aaron interview the parents of a child with a burn on his hand so severe, he could not have done it to himself. Freya demands the father tell her what happened, accusing him of lying and wanting to make him pay for hurting his own child.

When the mother’s phone rings, she leaves the room, saying they will leave when she returns. Once she is out of the room, the father whispers, “help us.” He hands the child to Aaron and then lifts his shirt to show serious bruises and cuts. Freya realizes that the mother is the abuser. Aaron tells the man that he will help, excluding Freya, confusing her.

After work, Freya feels her compulsion bubbling up, and though she tries to fend it off, she gives in. Before leaving, she puts a can of Coke in the fridge. As she reaches her car, her neighbor, Hugh, tells her met her nephew on the elevator. Freya brushes him off as she leaves and thinks of how she does not have a nephew.

Freya drives to the park. As she waits for football practice to end, she receives a call from a random number. She picks up, and when a familiar voice asks if she is Freya, she hangs up and throws the phone, terrified. As the young boys leave practice, she sees one boy walking alone and calls out to him.

Freya met the twins Arthur and Pascoe when she was 12 and they were 14. Her mother, Beth, had Freya as a teenager and left her in Norfolk with her own mother. For two months every summer, Freya would stay with Beth by the sea in Cornwall. Beth was a disinterested mother, and had a new boyfriend each summer.

Next to Beth’s cottage lived the owner and their neighbor, the wealthy Kitto Teague, who was renovating his house. One day, as Freya walked down to the beach, she encountered the twins. They looked down on her and told her that their father hired a hitman to kill their mother because she was cheating. They swore her to secrecy, saying that if she told anyone, Kitto would kill her too.

Freya asks the boy, Rufus, how to get to Ranleigh Crescent. He gives her directions, but she asks him to join her and direct her, promising to give him a ride home after. Rufus is anxious but gets in. Freya drives past their destination, and when he protests, she tells him that she just needed to know where it was, and that she will drop him off after a quick stop at her home.

When they park, Freya tells Rufus he should come up with her. Inside, she insists he has a Coke though he grows scared. She shakes it before giving it to him, and when it explodes, she makes him take his shirt off to wash it. She revels in his anxiety, thinking of revenge. She pushes Rufus toward the bathroom.

Aaron asks Freya out for a drink to discuss his career, and she reluctantly agrees. They meet at a pub, and he reveals she is the reason he wanted to become a doctor. Her hospital runs a foundation that makes the doctors talk to students about the medical profession. When she came to his school, her compassion for burn victims inspired him.

Freya tells Aaron about the trial she sat on and how embarrassed she was that they delivered an incorrect verdict. Robbie is in jail for another five years while Evan is dead, having died under mysterious circumstances in prison.

Aaron tells Freya about his girlfriend, who is training to be a pilot. When Aaron asks Freya why she chose burn victims, she tells him it is because everyone looks away from them because they are horrified. She then thinks of Arthur and Pascoe and considers telling the actual truth of why she chose burns. She decides against it, not wanting to sit through another trial.

Behind the twins’ house was a pit dug for a pool installation. That summer, Freya spent her time with Arthur and Pascoe, glad to finally have friends. One day, they told her about the caves on the shore and led her deep into their labyrinth. Just as she worried that they were lost, they stopped to play a “game.”

Intrigued after learning about sex in school, Freya agreed to have sex with Arthur though she did not enjoy it. When Pascoe wanted a turn, she refused, but Arthur held her down. She continued to go with them to the cave every day, believing that it was the only way to maintain their friendship.

When Freya told the twins she would not let them to rape her anymore, they were angry. They stayed away for days, until one night, they knocked on her door with flowers. Freya accepted their apology and followed them when they told her they had something to show her. They brought her to a furniture crate in the pit, and when she got in, they nailed the cover on and buried her, telling her that she needed to think about her behavior.

After Freya finished assaulting Rufus, he cried, saying he did not want it. Freya manipulated him, saying that he took advantage of her and raped her. She warned him that if he told anyone, he would be in trouble and end up on the sex offender’s list. He had a breakdown, and she had to drive him home.

Two weeks later, Freya hears a knock at her door and is shocked to find George, waiting. She never assaults a boy twice, as she needs only one time to ruin their chances of forging healthy relationships. He confidently walks in, sits down, and demands sex. He makes it clear that he understands what she did and will not be intimidated. When she asks how he found her, George admits that while she was in the bathroom, he called himself from her phone, saving the number, and then tracking his phone’s location history to find the apartment. She refuses him, but he threatens to report her.

Freya prepares for a surgery with Aaron, but when her pager goes off, they rush downstairs to find a woman and her three young children arriving with severe burns. The baby is dead, the boy and mother clinging to life, and Freya realizes that only the daughter has a chance of survival.

Aaron sits with the boy and holds his hand until he passes away. His mother dies minutes later. Afterward, Freya compliments his empathy and tells him that he will make a great doctor. They discuss how men are always the culprits in crimes. Aaron pushes back, saying women do harm as well.

The police officer investigating the case approaches them and confirms that the husband did this, suggesting that the woman pushed her husband too far. Both Aaron and Freya berate the officer for blaming the woman. Back in the hospital, Freya watches a boy who attempted to hang himself arrive. Freya can tell he is likely brain dead. The boy is Rufus.

Freya spent the whole night buried alive in the coffin, suffering. When the twins unearthed her, they insisted it was a game. When Freya returned home, she found her mother, Beth, on the couch and realized that she did not even know she was missing.

She heard a toilet flush, and Kitto Teague walked out. She was expecting Eli, her mother’s boyfriend, who was also renovating Kitto’s house. When she asked about Eli, both Kitto and Beth said they fired him.

For the rest of the day, Freya sat in her room, thinking of how the trauma of the night before would follow her through life. She only had a week left before returning home—enough time for revenge.

George comes to Freya’s apartment seven times. On his 15th birthday, he comes over and refers to her as his girlfriend and asks if they can do something outside of the apartment. Freya worries that he will tell other people about them, and he promises he will not.

Freya does not trust him and puts sleeping pills in his beer. While he sleeps, she goes through his phone and finds some messages about their sex to his friend in the hospital, including a photo of her breasts that she was not aware he took. When George wakes up and demands sex again, Freya decides she must stop this.

Freya attends Louise’s retirement party at a bar. After briefly connecting with Louise, Freya joins Aaron and meets his girlfriend, Rebecca. Freya intentionally says Rebecca’s name wrong to show she does not care. Rebecca and Freya discuss their parents, and Freya lies, saying her parents died in a fire.

Freya pushes Rebecca about her father, whom she reveals is Brendan Carvin, the now-imprisoned pedophile, and asserts that she wants nothing to do with him. Freya questions Rebecca if she thinks Brendan was always like that or if something happened to him to make him act the way he did. Rebecca responds that it does not matter, because he chose to give into his impulses and hurt others.

In Freya’s final days before returning home, Arthur and Pascoe blamed her for being buried in the crate, saying she should not have climbed in. One day, in the village, she saw Eli and joined him. She tried to flirt with him, hoping that he was a way to escape Beth and her life. He dropped his lighter, and before he found it, Freya grabbed it. It was the last time she saw him before his trial a year later.

Beth promised to spend the last night of Freya’s stay with her, but instead went out with Kitto. Freya watched until late at night, when Beth and Kitto returned and went to bed. She went to the garage and used Eli’s lighter to set the fuse box on fire. She ensured that her fingerprints were not on the lighter before throwing it outside where it could be found. She escaped Beth and worked hard to earn a scholarship. When she turned 18, she left her grandmother and never saw her again.

One night, Freya ignores George’s texts completely, and he texts her at different intervals for hours. In some, he is texts how much he loves her while in others he threatens her violently. The next day, she texts him that she had an emergency surgery and fell asleep afterwards. She invites him over that night.

When he arrives, Freya gives George a Jack Daniels and Coke laced with oxycodone and morphine, and after 30 minutes, he suffers a stroke and collapses. He watches her as she calmly answers emails. She does not even notice when he dies. She takes him to the hospital, knowing the route to take to the morgue to avoid cameras. When she returns home, Freya pours herself a drink and wonders if she has ruined enough boys’ lives.

Freya takes a week off before returning to work. They found George’s body and connected it to a missing person’s report, though they cannot understand what happened.

On her first morning back, Aaron asks to speak with Freya privately. In her office, he reveals that Freya raped him after the school program where she inspired him to be a doctor. She told him that she had textbooks for him at her home, but when they arrived, she gave him a can of Coke that exploded on him, and before he knew it, they were in her bed.

Aaron tells her that he lost his childhood because of her, and that he cannot have a normal relationship. She offers him money, but he tells her that he is going to report her now, and that his friend, whom he hints that she knows, helped him through this.

She rushes after him, and as the elevator closes, she sees Aaron hugging Hugh. Freya drives away from the hospital, not knowing what to do. She stops outside a school. When she sees a boy leave, she thinks of Arthur and Pascoe, and drives up to him. She waits until she is next to him to decide whether she will roll the window down or not.