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It was following Joe’s arrest that Ellie sat down and first tried to stitch together what remained of her heart. Such an endeavor was difficult, what with hearts being slippery and prone to easy pain, but she couldn’t afford to let it spill out everywhere.
The tear was ragged and gaping; it looked very like a hungry maw. She locked herself in the hotel room’s restroom as her sons slept with her heart in one hand and a needle in the other, and worked on trying to stitch the pieces together. She could practically see the moments that had caused the damage written in its thumping surface.
It was Joe.
Hardy’s words had the top fissure, a scalpel’s thin painful cut.
Can I see Tom?
Joe’s question deepened the first wound, only made worse by her fury, and her heart screamed as it started to come apart.
How could you not know?
And finally Beth’s accusation, spoken so that the cuts split open and begun to spill its Lifeblood, fallen to pieces when the words cut too deeply.
Hearts are resilient enough but sometimes things become too much for them to handle. Care and time can heal them, but first Ellie had to make sure hers wouldn’t continue to crumble on her.
She never forgot the first time Tom came upon her sewing the pieces together; rather than sympathy, he took it as a point of contention that she would dare feel so emotional about losing Joe when she helped put him in jail. He was young, unable to distinguish something as intricate as nuance. She forgave him even as the new stitches she’d made fell apart and tears burned her eyes.
‘I hope it hurts every time you have to put a stitch in, Mum.’
Painful? Yes. But not as painful as it was to find out she had married a pervert and an eventual murderer. The empty half of her bed was hateful and endless, but it was better than being in Joe’s presence.
Someday Tom would understand. She wouldn’t accept any other outcome, even as she watched him distance himself and finally move out completely.
No tears then, surprisingly– she’d merely sat in her chair and sought to put more of the pieces together on quiet evenings. She kept them in a small covered container in her bathroom cabinet when she wasn’t working on putting them together, and there were a couple of times she’d had to keep Fred from playing with them.
She’d brought them with her on her trip with Hardy to Sandbrook during the trial, when they’d had to share the hotel room. She’d left the restroom door open and almost dared him to say anything about what she was doing.
He’d walked in on her as she’d finished up one of the last stitches that had slowly been coming loose in the last few days; mostly put together now, there was still more string than sinew holding it together. His expression had gone very lax then, almost smooth, but he wasn’t disgusted.
‘Make sure you clean up the blood in the sink after you're done, Miller. We don’t want people to think you’ve committed a crime.’
‘Knob,’ she’d called after him as he’d left, but she’d smiled a little nonetheless. Count on him to be a heartless bastard– she’d almost begun to appreciate it.
She hadn’t felt so much like an arse herself until she’d heard Hardy’s story and about his scarily possessive ex wife. Of course in his usual flippant way he’d waved her shame aside. ‘I’ve lived like this a long time now. Leave it alone.’
She couldn’t help but wonder what it was like to live without your heart. Did it make things easier, less emotional, when the storms of life hit? It certainly seemed to help with his job as Detective Inspector and the distance you needed to do it.
Still, though. It didn’t make it right.
It had become a normal thing for her as they worked on solving Sandbrook– she sewed the last stitches needed to hold her heart together in the down time they had, and didn’t have to worry about Hardy’s reaction to it. That last day in his little blue shack before he left, Ellie heard him talk about going to live near his daughter, and she’d had to bite her tongue to keep from blurting out her plea.
Take me with you. Ask me, just ask me to do that– I won’t say no.
The intensity of the wish took her aback, but perhaps it wasn’t so surprising. Was it from sheer dependency, some sort of reverse trauma bonding that made her want to stay near him?
Could they have any sort of healthy relationship together like that?
She watched him walk away from Broadchurch, lit by the dying rays of the sun, and been careful to keep her hands held over her heart to prevent it from falling apart all over again.
This pain, like most pain, eventually shifted weight; the sinews grew back and her heart strengthened daily. Her sons helped her bring new life into the house she and Joe had once sought to build into their own fairytale castle, and best of all she and Beth started to repair the shreds of their former friendship.
“I couldn’t let you in, Ell,” Beth had said the day they went to Danny’s grave together. “I’m sorry about that now, but I just couldn’t. It was easier to blame you than it was to blame myself– about how I could possibly have failed him so badly.”
And Ellie understood; understood the pain and the fury and the longing. “It was only one person’s fault, Beth, and that’s Joe. Danny–” here her voice wobbled, the echo of her cry months before echoing in her ears, “he was eleven.”
The crying they’d done on each others’ shoulder that day was cathartic. The ice that had frozen Beth’s own heart following Danny’s murder was thawing and soon spring would arrive for her, and in the meantime they wandered their mutual griefs as a minefield taking one slow, careful step at a time.
In the two years of his absence Ellie was able to mostly consciously forget about Hardy; her days were filled with finding her place again in Broadchurch, both as a DS and a citizen. Tom and Fred both had school, and after school events, and Tom had his sports, and she went to bed exhausted most nights and too tired to dream.
A month before his return, she dreamed she was searching through an attic full of beating, thumping hearts all stuffed into jars. It was a small dusty space and hard to see in, but she knew which– and whose– heart she was looking for, but there were so many and she could hear footsteps coming up the stairs ready to catch her–
She woke up that morning off-kilter the rest of the day, unable to remember what it was that had haunted her dreams. Her heartbeat thumped in her ears where her head lay on the pillows, allowing her the knowledge even in the dark that she was still alive.
And then the surprising bastard showed up on her doorstep one evening quite out of the blue, and her heart had flipped in her chest to see him. Still skinny, and still wearing a wrinkly godforsaken suit, but his hair and beard were shorter and there was color to his cheeks she hadn’t seen before and he even smiled a little to see her.
God, she’d missed him.
“Gonna invite me in, Miller, or leave me standing here all night?”
And there was the irritation right on schedule. He made her want to hit him upside the head sometimes.
“Still a heartless bastard?” she shot back.
“Always.”
She couldn’t stay angry with him. She rarely could anymore. He invited himself back into her life again like he’d never left, the knob, and he’d brought Daisy with him. The issues with Tess he never actually breathed a word about one way or another, but she could guess, and it made her angry. How dare the possessive woman keep hold of something not hers?
“She didn’t–” She stopped herself before she could finish the question, but of course he noticed.
“What?”
Damn him and his hearing. “She didn’t take Daisy’s heart too, did she?”
The alarm that flared on his face made her stomach drop, but then it disappeared and he was shaking his head. She’d merely startled him with the idea of it. “No. Tess knows that’s the one thing I’d never stop fighting her over.”
Good to know. But there was still the fact that he himself didn’t have his own, and he needed it. Ellie was the one he loved– but how was he supposed to be able to live completely free of his past marriage if Tess was keeping hold of it? He wouldn’t.
So she got it back. She met him in the moonlight with the jar in her hands, able to hear the beat of his heart as he realized what she held.
“Is that–?”
“I think this belongs to you.”
That night, when they were curled up together in the sheets, he asked her to show him her own heart. “Has it healed all the way yet, Miller?”
She smiled and ran her hands through his hair. “Nearly.”
Scar tissue marked the lines of healed sinew, pale and silvery in the moonlight, threaded through like tinsel. Its thumping was a little harsher than normal. “It has to work a little harder now,” she said simply, and she saw the way his eyes softened at the words. He laid gentle fingers upon it where she cradled it in her hands.
“The things you’ve survived, Miller,” he said quietly, and it was the gentlest (proudest) she’d ever heard him.
“The things we’ve survived,” she responded gently, and kissing him was like a benediction and promise in one.
Loving Hardy was easy. Easier than it was to love Joe, in a way. She could trust him to be exactly who he said he was, knob though he was at times. But that was okay– her heart was tougher now, and could handle it.
Now she would lay in the bed sharing its space with the man she’d grown to love; its empty endless half filled with warmth and home. She would lay her head on his chest and hear the comforting sound of his heart back where it belonged, and soon hers would match beats– a lot worn, a little strained, but whole.
Just as they should be.