Elly
THEN
When she comes out, she finds Siobhan standing by the sinks, rubbing lotion into her skin.
The oval mirrors are steamed, dripping with condensation, and the air around her dances with moisture.
Siobhan is wearing a dressing gown, wet hair swept up and off her face by a towel.
Her face is free from make-up, and she looks younger than usual, a little softer.
She gestures to the floor, which is covered by an inch of water. One of the pipes running into the sinks has burst and is leaking all over the tiles.
“This place is a health and safety hazard,” Siobhan is saying. “Last night I put a foot through a floorboard in our room. Don’t think Haina’s ever heard of redecorating.”
Elly frowns. She’s experienced similar things in the house – doorknobs coming off in her hand, chairs wobbling dangerously underneath her – but in the face of Siobhan’s criticism, she finds herself wanting to defend it.
She wonders if Siobhan knows the truth about the house yet, what happens to the guests behind the closed door of the study, and hopes she doesn’t.
“Haina’s doing her best,” she says. “It’s an old house. ”
Siobhan shrugs, kicking up the water like a child in a puddle. Elly’s making her way out of the door when Siobhan says, “Wait.” She peers at Elly strangely, with a little too much intensity. “I recognise you.”
Elly’s hair is wet and cold around her shoulders. She shudders. “I’m sorry?”
Siobhan bites her lip and tilts her head to the side, then lets out a little laugh, clicking her fingers. “God, it’s you. You’ve been all over the news.” She watches Elly’s face carefully. “But obviously you wouldn’t know that.”
Elly feels as though someone has knocked the wind out of her, stolen the air right out of her lungs. “No,” she whispers. “I wouldn’t know that.”
“Elly Carmichael, isn’t it? Yeah, I’ve seen you.
I mean, I guess you’re lucky that people care enough to look for you – I don’t think it’s the same for everyone here.
But, man, you’re everywhere. Much-loved pregnant wife and baker, went missing on her wedding night.
Hollywood stuff. Your husband’s giving loads of interviews, appeals and shit.
Crying in every single one. He gives me the creeps a bit, to be honest. If you weren’t standing right in front of me, I’d probably think he was involved.
No offence.” She whistles, looking at Elly from head to toe, as if she can’t quite believe that she’s real.
“Holy shit. You’ve just been here the whole time, and they can’t find you. How is that even possible?”
Elly swallows. She can’t take in anything Siobhan is saying, nothing after, I guess you’re lucky that people care enough to look for you. She pictures her face on the news. She wonders which photo they would have used but doesn’t know why that matters.
Ethan. Ethan is looking for her. She’d known he would be, but to have it confirmed makes her eyes burn.
She thinks back to a morning in his flat, a few months ago now.
He’d made an espresso then climbed back into bed with her, head nestled between her shoulder and chin.
He smelled of coffee and shampoo, of potential, of the day starting.
She’d only just started to feel the baby move at that point, each kick was still a surprise, and she’d reached over to grab his hand and hold it to her bare stomach.
She’ll never forget how his face looked when the baby kicked under his hand – so vulnerable, broken wide open with hope.
She’s taken so much from him, she thinks now, standing in the bathroom doorway.
How could she have taken so much from him?
“You alright?” Siobhan asks.
“No,” Elly murmurs. “I don’t know.”
“It must feel fucking insane,” Siobhan says, nodding, as if she understands completely.
She unwraps her hair from the towel, letting it fall in dark tendrils around her face.
When she looks back at Elly, it’s with a new focus.
“Hey, what would you think about doing a couple of interviews to camera? I’d love to get your perspective.
Why you came here, why you’ve stayed, how it feels to have people out there looking for you. ”
“What? No.” The bathroom is hot and muggy.
It feels as though blood is rushing too quickly through Elly’s veins.
To be spotted moving around the house in the background, even to face the camera wordlessly, as she had in the hallway after her session with Haina – that was one thing.
To be interviewed, to speak, to have to explain herself – that was something else entirely.
“I’m sorry, I just can’t. What if they… what if they saw it?
How could I possibly make them understand? ”
Siobhan waves a hand, as if none of this really matters.
“We could blur your face, change your voice, if you really wanted us to.” Her gaze wanders for a second then she looks back, eyes crackling.
She reaches out to grip Elly’s upper arm, making her flinch.
“No, wait. What if we did show them who you are? What if you used the documentary as a way to, you know, communicate with them? Let them know you’re okay, and that they can stop looking for you?
You could tell them that you’re safe, but that you’re not going back.
” Then, after a pause, “I guess you’re never going back? I mean, how could you?”
Elly feels the wooden doorway digging into her shoulder.
It hurts, but she needs it to keep her standing.
Is she going back? She hasn’t let herself think that far ahead.
She doesn’t know if Hex House is the kind of place you can stay forever, or if she’d even want to.
But if she doesn’t go home, she can’t think of a single other place she might go.
“I think I saw your mum on one of the appeals, too,” Siobhan is saying, thoughtful now.
“She looks a lot like you, doesn’t she? She seemed, I dunno, a bit broken by it all.
The working theory is that you’ve been abducted or murdered or something.
” Siobhan shrugs again, almost nonchalant.
“I don’t know. I won’t tell you what to do.
But if it was my mum, I’d at least want to tell her I was okay. ”
Elly thinks about her mum sitting alone at the kitchen table, surrounded by the offcuts from the bunting she’d made for Elly’s wedding.
She pictures her leaving her phone on loud, constantly checking it and waiting for it to ring; lying in bed during the loneliest of hours, thinking the worst of things: Elly, beaten and broken in a ditch.
Elly, face-down in the river. She screws her eyes shut.
It’s useless, trying not to cry. It only ever makes it worse.
“Shit,” Siobhan says on an outbreath. “I really wasn’t trying to upset you. If you let us interview you, well, it could work for both of us, is all I’m saying. Just think about it.”
Elly wipes away the wetness on her cheeks and sighs, feeling heavy, feeling as though her bones are made of ancient stone, being dragged deep to the earth. “I’ll think about it,” she says.
* * *
The guests usually spend the downtime between lunch and dinner relaxing, and it’s often the time Elly feels that the house is at its fullest, in its most natural state.
Some of the women play the piano in the parlour.
Lakshmi, with her long, graceful fingers, is the most skilled, playing complicated melodies with an almost lazy ease.
Some have their private sessions with Haina, while others mend holes in the communal clothing or knit things for the winter months: chunky scarves, patterned mittens, woolly hats.
Elly likes to wander the gardens, lying out on the sun-soaked stretch of lawn or watching the bees from the rickety bench by the back door.
Sometimes, she reads one of the battered paperbacks from the nook on the landing.
Time can move slowly in these hours, and Elly finds herself wondering how she filled her afternoons before.
But of course, in the before time, there had been a phone that was always pinging with messages, a job to go to, a Netflix account with new viral shows every week.
There is next to no technology in the house, bar the old record player in the parlour, and Haina had told Elly on her first day that this was intentional.
How do you heal from the world if it’s right here with you?
she’d asked, almost confrontationally. Elly had felt flattened into her seat by Haina’s vigour.
How can you expect yourself to evolve, in the midst of all that noise?
She hadn’t understood it fully at the time, but after speaking to Siobhan, she thinks she can appreciate Haina’s approach a little more.
It’s the lack of technology that makes it so incongruous when she hears it – the tinny whine of recorded voices.
It reaches her as she passes the parlour on her way out to the gardens after lunch.
The day is warm but not as oppressive as the ones before it, the leaves on the trees starting to hint at their decay, only just beginning to turn warm shades of gold and orange.
Elly craves the fresh air, the breeze, but the noises coming from the parlour make her pause.
Theo is sitting on the sofa with his laptop, surrounded by a small group of women: Lakshmi, Margot and Janine.
Elly hears Haina’s voice from the computer.
He must be playing them some of the clips he’s recorded around the house.
“There’s me!” Lakshmi squeals, jabbing her finger at the screen. Her dark ponytail swings wildly. “Wait, pause it. Do I really stand like that? I look so… hunched.”
“You look fine,” says Theo. Elly doesn’t miss the way those words make Lakshmi look away, colour seeping into her cheeks.
“Do you have any of me?” Janine asks, reaching over Lakshmi to take control of the keypad.