Once

Twenty Eight

Elle came quietly out through the back door. She'd been hanging about in the kitchen and she heard Russell stop talking a minute or so earlier. As she came out into the garden she found him sitting on the back step, his phone still in his hand.

She quietly sat down beside him. For a few moments they just sat looking out across the garden, watching the leaves of the overhanging trees making patterns of light on the grass. A bumblebee buzzed lazily round the flowerbeds, oblivious to the horrendous event that had happened in that house twenty minutes before. It nuzzled itself in among the petals of a few begonias and then flitted off over the fence.

"What did your mum say?" Elle asked at last.

"She's coming now. She's going to take grandma back to ours for a few nights."

He still looked numb and dazed, and deathly pale. His eyes were gazing off into the woods.

Elle said:

"What did you tell her?"

"I said we came in and found some pictures broken. And grandma couldn't remember breaking them."

A sickly look of guilt and misery came across his face. Elle didn't press him to talk about it anymore.

"Where's David?" he said.

"Cleaning up," Elle replied.

She did her best not to shiver. When she'd left him David had been scrubbing the wolf's blood off the skirting board.

She sensed Russell turning his head, and she turned hers to meet him. There were tears brimming in his eyes.

"Elle," he said, his voice hollow and choked.

"Russell, you don't have to -"

"Elle," he said again. He had something to say and he was going to say it, whether she liked it or not. "I need to apologise. For not believing you. And for what I said to you today." He took a long, slow breath and said, "I'm sorry, Elle."

She just nodded slowly back. This apology was as much for him as it was for her, but she was immensely grateful for it all the same.

For a few minutes today, when Russell had stormed out of her house, she thought she'd lost something. Something that ripped a hole right through the middle of her. And then, as she'd been tearing blindly through the woods, she'd been more scared than she ever had that she'd never be able to get it back again.

Now that thing she thought she'd lost was sitting beside her on the back step, and everything was just how it had been before - how it had always been. Except for the fact that Elle had just saved Russell's life by beating a wolf round the head with an umbrella, of course.

Russell quietly laid his head on Elle's shoulder, and she rested her head on top of his.

He said to himself, as if he were trying out the words out loud:

"It's all true. Jesus, Elle, it's all true."

After a moment she replied:

"Yes, Russell. It's all true."

They both fell into a silence that said everything they needed to say.