Chapter 15
“Your spine is straight. Your feet are centred on the earth. Stretch your arms out wide to feel your chest open up, releasing all the tension you hold. Breathe out. Beautiful. Feel your connection to all that flows through you and within you.”
Estella wobbled. She never fucking wobbled. Her chest was wide open, just like Jasmine had instructed and she didn’t like it one bit.
“Come down to a kneeling position and bring your hands around to press your palms firmly into your back. When you lift your chest, feel your heart reach towards the sky…”
She couldn’t explain it. It was just that somewhere along the hour Jasmine’s words had started taking on strange and specific significance, beyond the simple instructions for moving their limbs.
Estella felt a crack slowly open up inside her psyche that she really wanted to stay closed, especially here in this high street studio above a strip of shops for fuck’s sake.
She didn’t want to lose it here, in front of all these curious onlookers, with nowhere to hide.
She fought hard — as she lifted her hips and raised her chest, feeling the burn in her thighs — to think of neutral things, anything to stop herself from breaking wide open.
Her mind flashed in rapid succession, trying to hold focus on the perfect black espresso she’d drunk that morning in a gentle sunbeam, only to fling up an image of dark blood pooled in the leather seats of the car as Kenneth drove them home from Gold Hill.
Then a flash, again, of Alison Hartmann’s face pale with terror as she gripped her girlfriend’s hand on the sofa, both sets of eyes fixed on the gun.
Estella squeezed her eyes shut tight and she saw emerald green grass and Ellie Graham caught in a surprised laugh. The world spun.
“Let go of everything in the past. Let go of everything you long for in the future. There is only right now. The present moment is all we have.”
Estella sunk down onto her heels, lay back on the yoga mat and wept.
It was dumb, perhaps, to do this at her own home.
It put her in more kinds of danger than she cared to imagine, but Estella didn’t trust any other way of doing things.
Her new house was slightly more vast than she needed, but far smaller than the home she’d shared with Mike.
The vastness was essential. It was a show, after all.
The head of the Grant family had to be unstoppable, formidable.
She had to be a fortress because anything else meant death.
That’s exactly how it would look to the outside. A stern, solid stone Victorian fortress. Not overly ostentatious, but well out of any truly innocent person’s price range. Set upon its own pristine lawn, protected by an elaborate wrought iron spiked fence, with a gate that admitted very few.
Inside, however, it was all Estella. She’d decorated it for pure comfort, all tender silky sheets in the bedrooms, impossibly huge soft sofas in the living rooms, delicate earthen stoneware in the kitchen, golden-hued floorboards throughout.
And then, of course, there was the attic bedroom.
Hidden away behind a false door: a safe room.
She nodded at the bodyguard she’d had stationed there.
Florence was lean, brown-skinned and ramrod straight, her salt and pepper hair cropped short, the epitome of no-nonsense.
She had a large cushy armchair to recline in — Estella had made sure of that — but instead she’d chosen a firm wooden dining chair to sit on, bolt upright, even as she read her way through a large pile of romance novels.
“How’s our hostage?” Estella asked wryly.
Florence nodded soberly.
“She’s okay,” she said. “She’s getting antsy though.”
“Makes sense.” Estella passed Florence and pressed on the hidden release notch that opened the nondescript wall panel, leading to a flight of just three stairs. She knocked lightly on the door at the top, before she entered.
The young woman, Ava Florelli, sat on the low easy chair across the room from the attic bedroom window.
The window was reinforced glass, letting through light though not a view.
Ava gazed towards it anyway, like a tender green plant wilting without sun, but when Estella entered she turned her face towards her instead.
“Can I go yet?” she asked immediately. Her dark eyes were red-rimmed, the fading bruise to her left cheek still visible. Her long dark hair was in a loose braid, and again, Ellie Graham’s chestnut locks popped unbidden into Estella’s mind.
“I’m sorry,” Estella told her. Ava began, yet again, to cry.
“We’re working on it,” Estella reminded her.
“You know that you’re safe here, don’t you?
” Ava cried harder, but at least she nodded.
She was barely twenty years old, but in this moment she looked both older and younger. She’d been through too much.
“I just…” Ava looked up wanly. “I miss my mum.” She scrunched her knees up to her chest and clung tight to them.
“I know,” Estella said quietly. It ripped at her to say it aloud, but she said it anyway. “I miss mine too.”
Ava sobbed. Estella sat on the floor next to her chair and held her hand for a long time.
When she finally left the room, Florence looked askance at her. Estella steeled her jaw.
“Make the call,” she said. “But not until tomorrow evening. We need all our ducks in a row before the meeting happens. We can’t take any risks. Everything hinges on this working out. Everything.”
That night, Estella couldn’t sleep. She paced her own bedroom, wandered downstairs to make a herbal tea, then returned to bed, the teacup neatly placed on her bedside table.
As she sipped, her mind raced for a safe place to land but for some reason the thought she kept returning to over and over was Zara Graham, Ellie’s mysterious sister, with the same colouring as her TV star sibling, though that seemed to be where the resemblance began and ended.
Ellie protected her, that much was clear.
Estella had poked and poked at the subject as they’d picnicked together in the park.
It had seemed the only possible fair trade for the tale of her mother’s degradation and fate.
But Ellie hadn’t budged and Estella had begrudgingly admired her for it.
Ellie might be scared of her, but she wasn’t backing down.
My sister has trauma was all she’d give her, and then a perfectly simple it’s not my story to tell, like it was completely out of her hands. Eloise Silver was full of surprises.
Estella had surprised herself, too. She’d planned to share just enough to fill herself out in Ellie’s eyes.
Maybe a sob story here or there, planted for the sympathy of it.
All things considered, the little girl lost angle would serve her best, should it come to television.
But somehow, all that had come out had been truth.
There was something about Ellie’s steady eyes, the calm pool of the deep green park on a warm summer’s day, that combined with Estella still forcing the last ugly bloodshed from her brain, had made it feel impossibly wrong to lie to her.
It gave her that same poignant cracked-open feeling she’d had in yoga earlier that afternoon, like something inside her was begging to spill. She just knew she had to resist it.
All the same, she was shocked to realise she couldn’t wait to see Ellie Graham again. Just one last time.