Chapter 5 #2
Despite everything, Alba smiled. It wasn’t what she expected from Ellie, but it felt honest. It felt…human, and quite frankly, necessary. “Maybe that’s what needs to happen for them to realise that their concern isn’t always a good thing.”
“Maybe I should send you after them.” Ellie’s eyes brightened at that, though the sadness remained like a shadow behind them. “I’m surprised nobody has pulled you to one side yet and told you. They’ve had plenty of opportunity.”
Alba held up a hand. “I swear I haven’t heard anything about it.”
“I know. I believe you.”
“Can I…ask what happened?” Alba’s voice softened, though part of her wasn’t sure she wanted to know anything further. Losing a child, losing anyone, was painful enough. Knowing the details wasn’t always necessary. “You don’t have to discuss it with me, though. Not if it’s going to upset you.”
For a second, Ellie didn’t answer. She stared down at her wrist and rubbed at the skin there as though focusing on the sensation might make the next part easier to tell.
“She called me that day during her lunch break. As you know, I don’t allow phones in class or corridors during or in between lessons, but pupils may ask for their phone at lunch time if they need to make a call to family.
” Ellie kept her gaze fixed on her own hands.
“She said she had a terrible headache and had to ask my permission before the first aid on duty could give her paracetamol. She’d recently started her period, and she’d been having a few little symptoms here and there. Naturally, I put it down to that.”
Alba nodded. “I can understand why.”
“I’d been called into a meeting with a pupil and their parents during the lunch break, so I didn’t have the chance to see to her myself.
” Alba noticed then that Ellie still hadn’t said her daughter’s name.
Not once. “When I’d finished the meeting, I was heading back across the main foyer and towards my office.
I saw her walking towards me, looking a little pale.
” Ellie paused as a tear slid down her cheek, but she wiped it away quickly and continued.
“I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know what.
She just…didn’t seem like herself. She was looking at me, but she wasn’t focused, if that makes sense? ”
Alba could barely breathe around the ache in her chest. “It makes sense.”
“I rushed towards her. I don’t know why, but I think it was probably just a mother’s instinct.” Ellie tipped her face towards the ceiling and exhaled a long, shaky breath. “She collapsed in my arms.”
That did it. The tears Alba had been fighting spilled over.
She had no right to be crying like this, not when this grief wasn’t hers, but she couldn’t stop it.
The image alone was enough to shatter something in her.
What kind of life carried on after that?
How did Ellie get out of bed each morning and put one foot in front of the other?
“There I was, on the floor in the middle of the school, holding my daughter in my lap for what I didn’t know would be the last time.
” Ellie sniffled and reached for the box of tissues on the coffee table.
She pulled one free, then handed it to Alba before resting a hand on her knee and squeezing gently. “I’m sorry. This is a lot.”
Alba dabbed at her eyes and steadied herself. “No. Don’t ever apologise.”
“I can stop. We…don’t need to do this.”
Alba shook her head. Yes, she was overwhelmed.
Yes, she could hardly comprehend the depth of what Ellie had lived through.
But more than that, she understood something else, too.
Ellie was trusting her with this. And perhaps, somewhere beneath the words, she was hoping for a response different from the ones she usually received.
The staff at school had known her daughter.
They had grieved, too. Their reactions would always be tangled with their own memories, their own pity, even their own horror.
Alba, new to all of it, could offer something different.
Not detachment exactly, but a kind of clear tenderness untouched by gossip or history.
“Unless you want to stop, then please continue.”
“I thought she’d passed out, that…maybe she hadn’t eaten properly that morning, or she was just feeling under the weather.
She just…she wasn’t coming ’round. When she should have been, she wasn’t.
She…didn’t.” Ellie closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath.
“The ambulance rushed her to the nearest hospital. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t the children’s hospital; they just wanted to get her in front of doctors as soon as they possibly could. ”
“Forgive me for saying very little, Ellie, but I…don’t know what to say.
” There were no words for something like this.
No perfect response and no phrase that could soften it.
So instead, Alba shifted closer and took Ellie’s hand.
She didn’t care that they barely knew each other.
She didn’t care that perhaps it was too soon for touch this intimate.
This story had to be one of the hardest things Ellie had ever told anyone.
Alba wrapped her fingers around Ellie’s and held on.
“But please know that I understand how hard this is for you.”
“She wasn’t getting better. In the ambulance, she just continued to deteriorate.” Ellie looked down at their joined hands and sniffled. “She’d suffered a brain haemorrhage. The scans confirmed it.”
Alba swallowed hard, struggling to keep her own emotions from spilling over again.
“There was some fancy medical term for it, but the easiest way for me to describe it is that it was a very rare bleed on the brain. There was mention of the blood vessels in her brain not developing properly when she was smaller, but that’s not something any of us could have known.”
“God, I’m so sorry.”
“They also told us that it would have happened no matter what. Whether it had been when she was younger…or older, it would have happened. We always would have lost her.” Ellie shook her head. “A ‘ticking time bomb’, they called her.”
The cruelty of that settled heavily between them. No matter who had done what differently, there never would have been a version of this story where Ellie kept her daughter.