Epilogue
Two years later
Ellie was awoken early the way she often was these days: by the raucous laughter of kookaburras in the trees outside her bedroom window.
She yawned, stretched and rolled over. For a moment her eyes fixed on the cold, empty other half of her bed.
She sighed, rubbing her eyes, and slowly slid out of the covers into the warm spring morning.
She could hear more bird song now, a chorus of bush birds, nothing she’d ever have heard back in Melbourne.
She smiled to herself as she made coffee from the pot already brewing in the small kitchen, thinking of how incredibly lucky she was to get to have this beautiful little cottage, up high on the hillside above the town of Gold Hill.
It had been rented before her by Hope Sullivan, until Alison Hartmann had sold her elaborate lakeside mansion and the two of them had bought a new home together, a beautiful, yet modest, Edwardian villa about ten minutes’ walk from where Ellie stood right now.
It served its purpose, Hope had told her, her eyes filled with tears as she said goodbye to the little house.
It gave me a safe place to land. And now it’s your turn.
Hope had been right. In the aftermath of the bloody battle at the O’Hara Hotel, Hope and Alison were the only people on the planet that Ellie could fathom even speaking to.
They’d known exactly how it felt to have your life explode in sudden violence, as well as the life of the woman you’d not even gotten to say I love you to before the nightmare erupted.
If it wasn’t for their care and patience, Ellie couldn’t even begin to contemplate how she’d have gone on.
Things had gotten progressively easier over time, as shocking as that was to contemplate.
Hugo and Harry had gotten married last summer, and both were thrilled that Gold Hill was the place that kept providing safe harbour for the people they loved.
Ellie couldn’t imagine living anywhere else now, even as she flew to Sydney for the occasional low-key acting gig, for the satisfaction and love of it, refusing any of the offers that would bring her star any higher.
Life had changed and so had her priorities.
She had all she wanted right here. Especially since Zara now dated the handsome Jac Hartmann, and the two of them — along with Arthur — came up regularly on weekends to visit.
Ellie took her coffee and wandered out the French doors into the warm garden, to find her partner, Aurora, looking surprisingly relaxed in a sunbeam.
“You know redheads shouldn’t sit in the sun,” she said, stepping out to join her.
Aurora just laughed, rolling her eyes. “And yet, I think I’ll take the risk” she said drily.
Ellie dropped a kiss in her gleaming red hair, admiring the way the strands reflected the light. She paused a second, breathing in the scent of her, her gratitude for her warm presence almost overpowering after everything she’d been through.
She took a seat next to her and closed her eyes in satisfaction. “Lottie!” she squeaked in fright, as the small snuffling rescue bulldog hurtled into her lap, making her spill coffee over her fingers.
“It’s not her fault,” Aurora said easily. She shrugged in response to Ellie’s solidly raised eyebrows. “You should have steadier nerves.”
Ellie scoffed, but settled herself back in the chair, the heavy little dog plonking herself happily on her lap.
Aurora would never hear a word against the creature.
She’d been the one who’d found her on the rescue website and begged Ellie for them to get a dog.
Ellie had been unsure, wondering if they were ready for this kind of step in their relationship, but she loved that she got to see this side of Aurora, this achingly soft heart of hers that had poured hours into rehabilitating a little neglected mutt.
She’s trying her best, she defended the dog, whenever Lottie showed her terrible manners.
She’s still learning how to live in the world.
Ellie looked out over the garden she’d carefully nurtured.
Hope had green thumbs and Ellie had been determined not to let the pretty garden go to ruin under her watch.
Harry helped out, teaching her how to prune the pretty pink tea roses, and made sure she trained the climbing clematis over the balcony rails.
The flowers gleamed like white stars in the summer heat.
“Oof!” cried Aurora, as Lottie made a quick trade, leaping from Ellie’s lap to hers. “She’s a fucking criminal,” she grumbled, wiping her own coffee splatter on her bare thighs, already petting the small dog’s ears, all forgiven.
“I mean,” Ellie said, unable to hide her smirk. “You’re one to talk.”
Aurora snorted out a small laugh. It had taken a long time for them to joke like this, but Alison had shared the details of an excellent trauma therapist — Prisha’s mum it turned out, because of course it was, bloody small towns — and moments like this felt easier.
Aurora’s rebirth, after the death of Estella Grant, hadn’t been easy, but as her sapphire blue eyes sparkled mischievously at Ellie, she felt nothing but gratitude.
“Speaking of,” Aurora said now, “I called Ken this morning.”
“How’s he doing?”
“Great, really. He’s been getting really into woodworking now he’s earned his privileges, and he loves getting to be close to his son since they’re in the same wing block.”
“Family reunion,” Ellie said, shaking her head.
Sometimes it felt un-payable, the debt they owed to Kenneth Broznovi?.
She still felt awkward about hitting him with a lamp that night.
Lucky I’ve got a rock solid head he’d grumbled under his breath at her, when she’d gone to visit him in Port Phillip Prison.
Still, Ken claimed to be happy, having finally paid his dues for a lifetime of misdemeanours as he’d described it.
He’d apologised to Ellie, because she hadn’t been wrong.
He had been there, the night she was assaulted.
He’d been tailing her secretly, trying to make sure she wasn’t a threat to Estella, but a Florelli had been tailing him, bringing the enemy straight to Ellie’s door.
He swore, blue, that he’d won the fight with the attacker, thrashed him properly, but that he’d decided the best course of action from there was to use the opportunity to show Estella, well and truly, what falling for a normie would lead to, dropping a bruised Ellie on her doorstep.
Blimmin backfired in my face though, he reflected. Don’t understand people, really.
Join the club, Ellie had thought. It had taken time for all the pieces to get put together.
Ken, it turned out, had found his way to the Grants in the first place, purely to try to take care of Estella, because he’d loved her mother.
Celestina Carletti must have been one hell of a babe, Ellie decided, because more than one person who’d known her had gone to great lengths to try to care for the daughter she’d left behind.
Ken had done his share the best way he knew how, with his own scars from a lifetime of violence.
As soon as he’d walked into the hotel that night he’d figured out a plan, though both Estella and Ellie had been too panicked by that point to listen to him.
He’d made it all work though. He walked right out of the hotel room with Ellie unconscious in his arms, the CCTV showing a woman with bright blonde hair and a blood red dress— Estella Grant, to a tee, just as she’d looked on arrival.
The footage got leaked to the media — lightly pixelated for the traditional news though to be found uncensored in various corners of the internet — but no matter how you squinted at it, there, clear as day, was Estella Grant’s lifeless body, and there was the man now sitting in jail for her murder.
Everything else had been Yolanda. She’d been tracking Estella privately, concerned that she’d take advantage of her ill-advised moment of freedom to flee, so when the frantic call from Estella connected, she’d been there in minutes, almost crossing paths with Kenneth on his way out.
She and Estella — still tied to the bedpost and bleeding slightly from the small cut Ken had made to her arm to make sure he had the right evidence to smear in the backseat of his car — had stared each other down.
Estella had done the one thing Yolanda had spent her lifetime longing to do and brought down both the Florellis and the Grants, seemingly overnight.
Justice had — to an extent — been served.
Detective Markos knew, in a heartbeat, that Estella’s only chance of not being murdered for her role in the takedown of both Melbourne’s crime gangs was either a lifetime of solitary confinement — and that wasn’t remotely foolproof — or witness protection, which a criminal of her calibre would never be granted.
In the end, Yolanda simply hadn’t been able to stomach the idea of even one more victim of the gangland wars.
She allowed Estella to take the blame for Jimmy Jenkins’s death — after all, she had a mile-long file on the TV executive too — and let the CCTV footage and blood in Ken’s car speak for itself.
He claimed on record that he’d dumped Estella’s body into the sea, because Ken loved Estella Grant enough to spend his last years in prison to set her free.
Of course, there was more to the cover-up than that.
The footage of Ellie herself arriving into her hotel, the footage of the real Estella walking out alive, Yolanda’s involvement on the scene…
all of it mysteriously disappeared. Ellie woke up worried about it in the middle of the night sometimes, but Aurora with her expertly dyed red locks, assured her that with both gangs done for, and Estella Grant dead and gone, no one was going to be looking too hard for flaws in that case.
Estella Grant had died so that Aurora could live and live she did.
When Yolanda had freed her from the hotel room, she’d had only two goals: to escape Melbourne alive and undetected and to find Ellie.
She’d had one remaining safe drop that she’d planted back when she was trying to survive Mike, and she used one of them to hide in plain sight - a COVID mask, bright hair hidden under a baseball cap, thick framed glasses and baggie forgettable clothes - and ridden the trains in a few directions to try to lose any tails, before making her way to the station closest to Gold Hill and walking all through the night.
It had been Alison Hartmann’s door she’d arrived at just before dawn, and Alison who’d let her in as though she’d been expecting her.
“She’s upstairs,” she said, by way of greeting.
Ellie, who’d woken up from the effects of the sedative Ken had given her and was pacing around on Alison’s balcony overlooking the dark lake, had flung herself into Estella’s arms, gripping her tight.
I’m sorry, she wept over and over. I’m sorry.
Estella hadn’t been able to get her to make sense, until finally their stories overlapped and contradicted and corrected each other until it was perfectly clear.
They were one-for-one, each having killed a man to save her own life, each as guilty as the other.
I’m not that innocent, Estella had warned her, detailing her years in waiting, the crimes she’d been a part of, the crimes committed on her behalf and around her.
It had taken more than a year after that — of brutal conversations, of breakdowns, of terrible dreams, mistrust and rebuilding — to even begin to figure out who they were, but right there, on the balcony of Alison Hartmann’s lake-house, Estella had said it anyway, the words that electrified Ellie to this day.
“I love you, Ellie Graham,” she’d whispered, tears streaking down her face, holding Ellie’s hand, blue eyes fierce as the light started to spill into the sky.
“I’m… furiously in love with you, and I’m sorry that I don’t know what to do with that, except that I should be fucking dead.
Instead, I’m here, holding your hand and getting to look at you in the sunrise, and I won’t let go of that.
Not ever. If you let me,” she remembered to add, this woman who’d always taken whatever she wanted.
Ellie gazed back at her in wonder. What the hell did love mean to a woman like Estella Grant?
Women had told Ellie they loved her only to walk away when things got hard, or they found another option they liked better.
Estella Grant had taken responsibility for a man’s brutal death, not just for Ellie’s freedom, but to try to give her back her sense of self. Being loved like that was… terrifying.
Ellie didn’t drop her hand, and she didn’t say I love you back.
There was time enough, if they were lucky, for that.
She gazed out at the pink and gold glow of the sun staining the sky, while Estella only gazed at her.
Ellie could feel her vulnerability, her humanity, her want radiating off her — fragile and strong, good and bad, careful and soft — and she turned to look at her.
“You need a new name,” she said. “As new as this morning.”
Just like that, Estella had picked up the burner phone she’d arrived with and literally googled it. “Aurora,” she said decisively. “It means the moment a new day breaks.”
“Aurora,” said Ellie. It sounded like someone she could, perhaps, safely love. With that, she kissed her, for the first time, as the light around them grew.