Then She Was Gone

by Lisa Jewell

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. The weight on her soul betrayed a belief that it would be the latter.

May was like the Friday night of summer: all the good times lying ahead of you, bright and shiny and waiting to be lived.

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.

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

His touch makes her feel everything she thought she’d never feel again, things she’d forgotten she’d ever felt in the first place.

You look just like my lost girl… the dimple, the broad forehead, the heavy-lidded eyes, the way you tip your head to one side like that when you’re trying to work out what someone’s thinking.

“As the father of your children, as a friend, as someone who shared a journey with you and as someone who loves you and cares about you. I don’t need to be married to you to be all those things. Those things are deeper than marriage. Those things are forever.”

But she is remembering now. Cooking doesn’t just nurture the recipient; it nurtures the chef.

They are not identical. But there is something, something alarming and arresting, a likeness that she can’t leave alone.

“Stories,” she says, “are the only thing in this world that are real. Everything else is just a dream.” Laurel and Paul smile and nod. Then they turn to each other and exchange a look. Not a wry look this time, but one of disquiet. Ellie used to read two books a week and when they teased her about always having her nose in a book, Ellie used to say, “When I read a book it feels like real life and when I put the book down it’s like I go back into the dream.”

She was quite, quite lovely and quite, quite brilliant. And I have to confess, I became more than a little obsessed.

Your boyfriend. His aura is all wrong. It’s dark. And she feels it, right there and then. Stark and obvious. Something askew. Something awry. You’re not who you say you are, she suddenly thinks, you’re a fake.

“I mean,” says Blue, “that a man who can’t love but desperately needs to be loved is a dangerous thing indeed.

Because I know and now she knows it, too. I am not the man she thought I was.

Creepy

And I knew, immediately, that Noelle was capable of stealing a child. And I knew immediately what I needed to do.

Do you see? At the very back? I dug it out in early November, just before I met you. Noelle Donnelly is under there. Before that she was in a chest freezer in my cellar. She’d been in there since the night she told me about Ellie. The night she told me Poppy wasn’t mine.

I KNEW IT

As for Floyd himself, Laurel told Poppy that he’d taken his own life because he felt so guilty about pretending to be Poppy’s father when he wasn’t. Poppy had swallowed back tears and nodded, in that grim, brave way of hers. “I really didn’t mind, you know,” she said. “Because he was a very good dad. He really was. He didn’t need to feel guilty. He didn’t need to die.”