Chapter 11
Ellie hissed in discomfort as the hot shower hit the grazes on her knees, her left elbow and palm.
She supposed they weren’t terrible injuries considering it was Estella Grant she’d tangled with, but she felt unreasonably pissed off despite herself.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had skinned knees.
Riding a bike as a child, quite possibly.
She was relieved she wasn’t about to film and get tutted at by a makeup artist for her skin imperfections.
The thought made her remember Estella’s scathing assessment of her performance.
Getting her tits out indeed, Ellie looked down at her wet body in the shower and glowered.
The way Estella had condensed Ellie’s full decade of high-level theatre performances and acclaimed — if minor — television roles into a soap star doing yoghurt commercials was fucking rude.
All things considered, Ellie wished she’d yelled at Estella more about this.
It turned out that all that watching as Estella smiled and chatted and glowed post-yoga had been a mistake, because in all honesty, Ellie had not expected her to be such a bitch.
She blinked at herself and laughed out loud, right there in the shower, because really Ellie?
A multiple murderer maybe, but not, like… a mean girl?
God, she was stupid. It was just that Ellie had invested so much time into this woman, trying to figure her out, trying to understand her, that despite how completely insane it was, it had stung when Estella had brushed her aside so easily.
Brushed aside? Thrown to the ground and shoved into a wall, more like.
Though, really it was the least Ellie had deserved, getting herself caught spying on a goddamned mob boss.
It seemed like the fear of the encounter kept belatedly catching up on her now she was safely home.
She couldn’t stop her limbs from trembling as she replayed her near miss.
She’d been given the generous gift of a really good scare and found herself quickly sobered.
No more. The Dossier was enough. The in-person research, if anything, had set her backwards, because now when Ellie inhabited Estella Grant’s body in future she’d have to forget what it felt like to be pushed around by her and have to fight all the harder to become the kind of villain who’d shove her forearm against another woman’s throat just because she could.
Ugh. She was going to have to go back to the goddamn gym.
It wasn’t until she had applied a handful of Band-Aids and gingerly gotten dressed to lie on her couch and stare up at the glimpse of sky from her thirteenth floor Lygon Street apartment, that the other thought struck her.
It hadn’t registered at the time — due to all the terror and whatnot — but as she searched the encounter for anything useful she could at least use she heard Estella’s words all over again.
You want to know me? You think we have some kind of a bond?
You think you understand me? You thought we could be friends?
Ellie sat bolt upright. Estella Grant — as steely and sharp, threatening and violent as she was — had betrayed herself.
Because Ellie might be a dumb soap star who couldn’t be stealthy if her life depended on it, but she’d also spent her entire life studying human faces, human voices, human movement and human emotion.
Estella had deep down wanted that connection between them, to exist. She’d wanted Ellie to understand her.
Because who the hell better to truly see Estella Grant than the woman who’d professionally inhabited her body?
Estella might have tripped Ellie over to make a point about stalking, but she’d slammed her into a wall because Ellie had denied and humiliated her.
Ellie got to her feet and started to pace.
Okay sure, she may have gotten herself roughed up by a dangerous criminal, but the encounter had finally given her what she wanted: something real about Estella Grant.
What was it? Loneliness? Wishing for real friends?
It had to be lonely at the top. And surely, for all the shallow yoga gal pals, running an entire criminal family enterprise must make it hard to meet friends.
Ellie went running for The Dossier, and selected forget-me-not blue — the exact shade of Estella’s eyes — for her next divider.
She grabbed out a marker and labelled it internal life.
What the hell was it, that lurked behind those eyes?
And then, she paused. She looked down at her injured palm and flexed it thoughtfully.
This next stage would have to be all conjecture.
There really wasn’t any other option. Ellie was a terrible stalker, and Estella would probably tie a brick to her feet and toss her into the Yarra if she ever approached her again.
Besides, after the last encounter, Ellie was quite clear, she was more than happy never to see Estella in the flesh, ever again.
“You absolute arsehole!” Zara shrieked at her and chucked a couch cushion at her head.
“I’m sorry!” Ellie cried. “I know it was dumb!”
“Dumb? You could have gotten killed!”
“I don’t think she’d go around killing people just for hanging out around her yoga class, Zaz—”
“You don’t know what she’d do! Stop talking like you know her! Besides, you’re not just some person, you’re the actor who played her on TV. You don’t know how she feels about that; you could already be on some kind of shitlist—”
“I mean, her shitlist is pretty full, don’t you think? There have to be stacks of people higher on the list than me. Besides, I don’t think she could get away with murdering the literal actor who played her, that’s a bit on the nose, even for Estella.”
“You’re not some kind of criminal expert, Ellie!”
“I played one on TV though. Remember when I was a forensic pathologist in that show about— okay, fuck, I’m sorry!” She ducked as Zara threatened her with another cushion.
“You are such a dick!” Zara huffed. “I knew you were up to something ridiculous. No one has a yoga graduation. There are no levels to pass, you idiot.”
“Are you sure? It would be pretty fucking cool to be a yoga black belt, though.”
“Promise me you’re done now. That you’ll never do something so fucking stupid again.”
“Oh my god, Zaz. I promise. On my life. I’ll never go anywhere near Estella Grant, ever again, in my whole entire life. I swear it.”