Then She Was Gone

by Lisa Jewell

The world would fall silent as it always does at Christmas, all those big loud lives sucked up behind a million closed doors.

I think of my parents in Washington, the purse of their lips, the unspoken words going through both of their minds: We should have left him in the hospital.

How, she wonders, could she have ever thought that Hanna would be Theo’s consolation prize? How, she wonders, could she have allowed herself ever to feel that way?

Mostly she has just been a miracle.

But there are, as at every wedding, people who are not here: ghosts and shadows.

Laurel’s mother finally passed away eight months ago. But not before she’d had a chance to meet Poppy. She’d clasped her hand and she’d said, “I knew it, I knew there was a reason why I was still here, I knew you were out there. I just knew you were.”

A nurse took a picture that day of the three of them. It should have been four, of course, but three was better t...

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.”

Paul approaches. “Are you OK?” he asks, his hand against the sleeve of her jacket. Laurel nods. She is OK. Her life is upended in every way. She is a mother again at fifty-five. She is making packed lunches in the mornings and writing down term dates in her diary. She is doing two school runs a day and putting someone else before her at every juncture of her life. And she is still, of course, traumatized by the revelations of the last months of Ellie’s life. Some nights when she closes her eyes she is in that basement, trapped inside those pine-clad walls, staring desperately up at a window that no one will ever see her through. But the nightmares are starting to fade.

And Hanna and Poppy are the best thing to come out of the horror of Ellie’s disappearance. Poppy hero-worships Hanna and Hanna adores Poppy. They are virtually inseparable.

Laurel catches Hanna’s eye across the room as they find their way to their seats. She smiles and Hanna winks at her and blows her a kiss. Her beautiful daughter. Her golden girl. Laurel catches the kiss and holds it next to her heart.