Then She Was Gone

by Lisa Jewell

Those months, the months before she disappeared, were the best months. Really. Just the best. Every moment presented itself to her like a gift and said, Here I am, another perfect moment, just look at me, can you believe how lovely I am?

Every morning was a flurry of mascara and butterflies, quickening pulse as she neared the school gates, blooming joy as her eyes found him.

But one wrong move, one tiny kink in the timeline, it was all over. Not just their love story, but all of it. Youth. Life. Ellie Mack. All gone. All gone forever.

If she could rewind the timeline, untwist it and roll it back the other way like a ball of wool, she’d see the knots in the yarn, the warning signs. Looking at it backwards it was obvious all along. But back then, when she knew nothing about anything, she had not seen it coming. She had walked straight into it with her eyes open.

A plume of ice went down Laurel’s spine. Hanna always came home. Hanna had nowhere else to go.

She had no one to call, no one to ask: Have you seen Hanna? Do you know where she is? Her life simply didn’t work like that. There were no connections anywhere. Just little islands of life dotted here and there.

What had Laurel’s life been like, ten years ago, when she’d had three children and not two? Had she woken up every morning suffused with existential joy? No, she had not. Laurel had always been a glass-half-empty type of person. She could find much to complain about in even the most pleasant of scenarios and could condense the joy of good news into a short-lived moment, quickly curtailed by some new bothersome concern.

That was how she’d once viewed her perfect life: as a series of bad smells and unfulfilled duties, petty worries and late bills. And then one morning, her girl, her golden girl, her lastborn, her baby, her soulmate, her pride and her joy, had left the house and not come back.

And then the police had arrived. And then the thing began. The thing that had never ended.

Hanna. Her middle child. The difficult one. The tiring one. The one she wouldn’t want to be stranded on a desert island with. And a terrible thought shot through her, so fast she barely registered it. It should be you missing and Ellie eating beans on toast.

So, that’s where it was. The first kink in the timeline. Right there, at four thirty or thereabouts on a Wednesday afternoon in January.

There was the next kink. If she hadn’t been such a spoiled brat, if she hadn’t been expecting her mum to wave a magic wand and solve all her problems for her, if she’d had even the vaguest idea about the reality of her parents’ finances, if she’d cared at all about anything other than herself the conversation would have ended there. She would have said, OK. I understand. That’s what I’ll do. But she had not done that.

And there it went, slipping away like a slippery thing, another chance to save herself. Gone. And she didn’t even know it.

Between the day in May 2005 that Ellie had failed to come home and exactly two minutes ago there had been not one substantial lead regarding her disappearance. Not one.

The last sighting of Ellie had been caught on CCTV on Stroud Green Road at ten forty-three, showing her stopping briefly to check her reflection in a car window (for a while there’d been a theory that she had stopped to look at someone in the car, or to say something to the driver, but they’d traced the car’s owner and proved that he’d been on holiday at the time of Ellie’s disappearance and that his car had been parked there for the duration). And that was that. Her recorded journey had ended there.

It was almost as though she’d deliberately made herself invisible.

After two years, they’d downgraded the search. Laurel knew what they thought; they thought Ellie was a runaway.

The downgrade of the search was devastating. Even more devastating was Paul’s response to this pronouncement. ‘It’s a sort of closure, I guess.’ There, right there – the final nail in the dry box of bones of their marriage.

Paul was not a bad man. Paul was a good man. She had married a good man, just as she’d always planned to do. But the way he’d dealt with the violent hole ripped into their lives by Ellie’s disappearance had shown her that he wasn’t big enough, he wasn’t strong enough – he wasn’t insane enough.

But then suddenly this January, out of the blue, the police had called and said that Crimewatch wanted to do a ten-year anniversary appeal. Another reconstruction. It was broadcast on 26 May. It brought no fresh evidence. No new sightings. It changed nothing. Until now.

Ten years of nothing. And now there was something.

Someone from up the street had recommended her. Noelle Donnelly was her name.

‘Teddy,’ she said. ‘Teddy Bear. But Teddy for short.’ Her first words to Noelle. She would never forget.

Ellie wanted to say, Stay, Mum. Stay with me. I’m not ready to be alone with this stranger.

Laurel hadn’t slept properly since 2005.

Jake and Hanna had moved away too, of course. Faster, she suspected, and earlier than they would have if life hadn’t come off its rails ten years ago.

her two had not looked backwards once they’d seen their escapes.

She was about to know something after ten years of knowing nothing. She might be shown evidence that her daughter was alive. Or evidence that she was dead.

Noelle Donnelly began to grow on Ellie a little over those weekly winter visits. Not a lot. But a little.

she often brought Ellie a little something:

She’d always ask after Theo as well, whom she’d met briefly on her second or third session at the house.

There was a snappy pace to their lessons now, a high-octane rhythm. So Ellie noticed it immediately, the shift in Noelle’s mood that first Tuesday in March.

Afterwards Ellie found her mother in the kitchen and said, ‘Mum. I want to stop my tutoring.’ Her mum turned and looked at her questioningly. ‘Oh?’ she said. ‘Why?’ Ellie thought about telling her the truth. She thought about saying she’s freaking me out and saying really weird things and I really don’t want to be alone with her for an hour every week any more. How she wished she had told her the truth. Maybe if she’d told her the truth, her mother might have been able to work it all out and then everything would have been different. But for some reason she didn’t.

passport. Ellie had not taken her passport. Laurel still had Ellie’s passport.

as she stared at the passport she realised it was not Ellie’s passport. It was Hanna’s.

‘I cannot wait,’ she said. ‘I cannot wait for it all to be over.’

It was during those years that she finally lost touch with her remaining children. She had nothing left to give them and they grew tired of waiting.

Then three years ago Laurel had finally given up on Ellie coming home again.

Three years ago she’d stepped backwards out of her lost daughter’s bedroom for the last time and closed the door behind her with a click so soft that it nearly killed her.

For three years she’d internalised her madness, shared it with no one. But now the madness was back.

The blame game could be exhausting sometimes. The blame game could make you lose your mind … all the infinitesimal outcomes, each path breaking up into a million other paths every time you heedlessly chose one, taking you on a journey that you’d never find your way back from.

NO, Ellie screamed at herself from beyond the beyond. NO. I DO NOT WANT YOUR PRACTICE PAPER. But the here-and-now Ellie, the one who wanted to spend her summer paragliding and losing her virginity, the one who was having pizza tonight and seeing her boyfriend tomorrow morning, that Ellie said, ‘Oh, right. Yes. That could be good.’

It was busy that Thursday morning. People passed on either side of them. Ellie thought of those people afterwards, wondered if they’d noticed, wondered if somewhere in someone’s head there lay an untouched memory of a girl with a rucksack, wearing a black T-shirt and jeans talking to a woman in a khaki waterproof with a cream shoulder bag. She imagined a Crimewatch re-enactment of these moments.

But nobody had seen Ellie that morning. No one had noticed her talking to a woman with red hair. No one had seen her walking with her towards Harlow Road. No one had seen Noelle Donnelly unlock the door of a small scruffy house with a flowering cherry tree outside and turn to Ellie and say, ‘Come on then, in you come.’ No one had seen Ellie walk through the door. No one had heard the door close behind her.

No one had seen anything. No one knew anything. After a twelve-week flurry of activity everything went still again.

And now Ellie was dead. The possibility was gone. Laurel was alone. Her family was broken. There was nothing. Literally nothing.

Until one day, a month after Ellie’s funeral, L...

She was never a trusting person, even before her daughter vanished and then turned up dead ten years later. Paul always said he’d taken her on as a long-term project.

But she asks these questions even more these days. Because she knows that the worst-case scenario is not simply a terrible thing that isn’t likely to happen.

Laurel has always taken care of her appearance. Even in the terrible early days of Ellie’s disappearance