Chapter Twenty-Two
On Wednesday, Elsa gave Celine the day off.
It was overdue, a make-up day for the extra hours she’d worked over the previous few weeks.
Lola and Cam were at school, which meant that Elsa only had Doris to deal with.
That should have been easier than having all three, but Doris was always a challenge when she was by herself.
Lola had been so different when she was four.
She’d always been happy to sit still with a colouring book and she’d been able to play for hours with Lego, whereas Doris needed to run, to jump, to build things and knock them down.
Elsa appreciated that about her daughter, but she couldn’t turn her back for a second, which made it next to impossible to get any work done.
By eleven o’clock, Doris had finally run herself to a standstill, and fallen asleep on the couch.
Elsa made a quiet cup of coffee and sat in the kitchen with her laptop.
She had work to do. Child Protective Services had made an appointment with her for the next day.
They’d sent her a bunch of forms to fill out and some PDFs about how fostering worked.
It was clear that she and Nathan would have to jump through some hoops if they wanted to hold on to Cam—which they did.
There was no way Elsa was letting that boy get sucked up into the system.
Elsa had only been working for half an hour when the bell for the front gate rang. She swore under her breath and hurried to the intercom. She pressed the button to turn off the bell and checked the camera. There was a courier waiting outside.
Elsa opened the front door and went to the gate. The courier was a woman. She was short, with a stocky build. She wore jeans and motorbike boots and a high-vis jacket, and she still had her helmet on. In her arms she carried a parcel.
‘Hello,’ Elsa said.
‘Elsa Anderson?’
‘That’s me.’
The courier handed over the parcel. Elsa signed for it, thanked the woman, and hurried back inside. By the time she got to the front door she could hear Doris crying.
Damn.
Elsa dropped the parcel on the kitchen benchtop and went to the living room, where Doris had been napping on the couch.
She made a brief attempt to settle Doris back to sleep, but realised quickly that it wasn’t going to happen.
With Doris you got a window for a nap—a single opportunity—and then you were done.
She would be cranky for the rest of the day.
Elsa turned on the TV and got Doris a little bowl of raspberries.
When her daughter was fully immersed in the adventures of Bluey, Bingo, Muffin and Socks, Elsa left her to it.
She figured she’d bought herself half an hour at least.
Back in the kitchen, Elsa put on the coffee machine again, then turned her attention to the parcel.
It was wrapped in black embossed paper and a red velvet ribbon, and had a handwritten card with her name on it.
There was a little daisy tucked into the ribbon, a single, delicate, fresh flower.
Elsa picked it up and held it to her nose.
There was a very faint fragrance. She opened the parcel.
Inside she found a glass jar surrounded by packing peanuts.
The jar was full of marshmallows. How lovely.
Marshmallows were her absolute favourite.
The label—also handwritten—said that the flavours were ’Smores and Dulce de Leche.
Gourmet marshmallows were a thing now? Elsa dug back into the box, looking for a gift card, trying to figure out who had sent her the package.
There was no card. Instead she found a single sheet of white paper, with two sentences written across the middle of the page, in delicate calligraphy:
I’m boring and drab and I can’t seem to hold a conversation. I don’t blame her for dumping me.
Well that was very weird. Elsa turned the paper over.
There was nothing on the other side. A mistake, maybe?
Someone had put the wrong sheet of paper into the box?
Absently, she opened the jar and ate a marshmallow while she read the paper again.
The marshmallow was delicious, but a second reading of the note did nothing to shed any light on the matter.
And she had no time to dwell on it. She still had pages of reading and forms to get through for Cam’s social worker meeting.
And she needed to contact her business lawyer to find out what could be done about getting the Darla Darling money back.
It was all so delicate. She felt like shit about letting Darla go, really she did, but feeling guilty wouldn’t save her business, and what else could she do?
The first step would be to make sure there was an ironclad non-disclosure agreement.
She couldn’t have it getting out that she’d fired Darla because she’d gained weight.
That would be commercial—and social—suicide.
Elsa started to write the email to her lawyer.
It was desperately hard to concentrate. She was so distracted.
She couldn’t stop thinking about Jack. Everything seemed so utterly wrong and frightening.
That he was sitting in a prison cell, charged with murder, for god’s sake, when her life continued, just as it always had.
Elsa’s phone rang. She answered the call.
‘Jeri? I sent you through my comments on the rough cut. Did you see them?’
‘Yes, love. I’ll get them back to you by tomorrow. Just wanted to talk to you about next week. Thursday’s not going to work for me.’
Elsa put a cup under the coffee machine and pressed the button for a long black.
‘Can you do Wednesday?’ Elsa said. ‘I can do it late if I have to.’ She and Jeri had a meeting planned to go through ideas for the next shoot. Elsa was suddenly tempted to cancel the meeting entirely. She wanted a break. A break from all of it.
On the other side of the phone, Jeri was talking. ‘Sorry . . . give me a second, just waiting for my calendar to load.’
Doris wandered out of the living room. ‘Mummmy. Where were you? We were watching Bluey!’ Her voice had that edge to it that meant that a full-on meltdown was imminent.
Elsa went to Doris and picked her up. She put her on one hip so that she could still hold her phone to her ear. ‘Sorry, baby. I’m just on a call.’
Doris spotted the jar of marshmallows. Her eyes lit up and her hands reached out.
‘Yeah, I can do Wednesday,’ Jeri said. ‘Not before five though, does that work for you?’
‘Let me think.’ Nathan had an early shift on Wednesday. He should be home to manage everything with the kids. Doris started to whine in earnest. Elsa sat her on the edge of the benchtop.
‘Mummmy!’
Elsa tucked her phone under her ear, opened the jar and handed a marshmallow to Doris, who stuffed it into her mouth and chewed, eyes crinkling in satisfaction.
Elsa’s phone buzzed with an incoming notification, then buzzed again.
‘I can do five,’ Elsa said. If Nathan got stuck at work, she’d have to ask Celine to stay late.
‘Where do you want to meet?’ Jeri was asking. Elsa’s phone buzzed again, then a fourth and fifth time in quick succession.
‘Let’s do Harry’s wine bar.’ She needed a drink, and a break.
‘Sounds dangerous,’ Jeri said. Elsa’s phone buzzed again. Doris reached for the marshmallow jar.
‘Gotta go, J,’ Elsa said. She ended the call. ‘No, Doree. No more sugar.’
Doris’s voice raised to a wail. Elsa picked her up and put her on the ground. She pushed the marshmallow jar away from the edge.
‘No more sugar. Are you thirsty?’
Elsa checked her phone. Her Instagram notifications were going off. She opened the app. She’d been tagged in a post by a username she didn’t recognise. The post said:
So much for women supporting women. Listen to this shit from supposed ally Elsa Anderson. Tell us what you really think, Elsa!
Confused, Elsa hit the play button on the video.
The video was a fan or paparazzi video of Darla Darling.
Darla was sitting at an outdoor table at a café, having lunch with a friend.
She was laughing, chatting and enjoying her food.
But someone had attached an audio file to the clip.
Elsa turned up the sound. Sweat broke out on Elsa’s forehead as she heard herself say:
‘And now, can you believe this shit? She must have spent the last three months sitting at home eating bloody Woolworths mud cakes, because she’s put on like, twenty kilos.’
She heard Nathan’s response:
‘Elsa, come on.’
And her reply:
‘I’m serious. We’re not talking like a little extra curve here.
We’re talking about a girl who went from looking like Bambi with tatts to looking like a dollar-store Robyn Henson in three months!
I love Robyn. She’s fabulous. But first of all, Darla is not Robyn, and also, I’m not hiring a plus-size model for my brand.
That’s not my offering. I don’t make anything over a size fourteen, just for starters. Plus-size is just not my market.’
Elsa pressed her hand to her stomach. She felt dizzy, felt like she was going to be sick.
The clip played on a loop. Elsa watched the video three times, frozen in the kitchen as Doris’s crying reached peak complaint.
She was paralysed, unable to move forward or flick off the video.
The comments were flooding in. Women who were genuinely horrified, hurt or upset; many others who just loved a dumpster fire.
I’ve been buying Elsa’s stuff since her first pop-up in Byron. I supported her even when she messed up with all that shipping chaos a couple of years ago. But this shit is foul.
Robyn Henson wouldn’t wear Elsa Anderson’s stuff for any amount of money. And this is why. Classless.
Yeah. And this is why the body positivity movement fails. Because scrape just beneath the surface and all those fake skinny bitches think like this.
What a cow.
No one I know would be caught dead in her stuff.
Never heard of her. Talk about the wrong way to go viral!
OMG DD is going to SUE her ass!