"Breaking, Broken"
It's a side she's never seen from him before. Ellie's used to brusqueness, rudeness, quiet stares that tell you plainly to shut the hell up and go away.
She isn't prepared for her question of Lee Ashworth to garner this: a confession and an explanation.
I found her. Pippa Gillipsie, she was in the river.
Oh god.
Ellie feels her stomach clench her heart stop for just a moment when in the space of an instant she realizes just what his story is going to be. Foreboding tickles the back of her head, prickling her neck and sending a shiver down her spine, and then he opens his mouth and talks, really genuinely talks, and she's bombarded by the single most damaging moment of his life.
Drowning. She remembers all those months ago during the case of Danny's murder seeing him tense and tight-lipped being on the boat in the harbor.
Don't like the water.
You're barely on it.
She had laughed silently at him then, her dislike of her boss enough to feel vindictively pleased that the man who infuriated her so much was scared of water. Now she feels only a gaping horror open in her gut. He doesn't even speak aloud of what it felt like to be drawn under water so deep your lungs feel like they're going to burst and all you can think of is the desperate need for air but it's there in the gravel tone of his voice, his accent grating and thick.
Water rots the body.
There had been a time when Ellie, younger and still going through the Academy, had seen the body of a man who had drowned while out in the ocean. It's an image that is still burned into her memory, and she doubts she'll ever be able to forget it.
And Pippa had only been a child. For three days the little girl had been left to decay in the waters of Sandbrook, discarded like trash. Hardy's voice is suddenly clinical, barely touched by inflection, but it's that that tells Ellie of the horror he still feels having found Pippa's body first. For a moment Ellie's mind flashes to the image of either Tom or Fred being the ones found like that and her imagination shuts down, unable to process the horror of such a thought. Her eyes burn and sting as Hardy continues, but she cannot tell him to stop.
I can still feel the weight of her. Water drippin' off her clothes all down me.
How has he managed to stay sane after going through this? She's tempted to ask him if he's ever gone to counseling for dealing with what he'd seen but she's frozen in her seat, unable to do anything but cry silently and imagine him, dripping wet, carrying Pippa Gillipsie's body to the river bank.
And finally his voice breaks.
What sort of person leaves a child like that?
She had thought him mad in the beginning, when he'd approached her with the idea of solving Sandbrook, a man who was obsessive with the idea of redemption. Now she realizes that it's never been about redemption at all for Hardy, not through the failing Sandbrook case or Danny's awful murder rap—it's been instead about the single horrible moment of finding an innocent child floating in a river, left there by some creature not decent enough to even label a human being.
It's in that moment that Ellie Miller realizes, too, that she herself has passed a point where she's no longer just passive about this case. Hearing Hardy's story she simply can't be, and she discovers that she's taken in just a piece of his private hell and horror. He'll never fully recover from the experience.
In a rare moment of pity and compassion, she vows that she'll help solve the Sandbrook case once and for all. For the families. For Pippa and for Lisa. And for him, so that he will perhaps be able to finally let Pippa's body go.