Chapter Text
The first time he sees her again, she smells different.
Sitting at the bar in the hotel, surrounded by the stench of lager and smothered by the omnipresent sea air, he shouldn't even notice, but he does. Because Ellie Miller is sliding on to the stool next to him, and she smells like oranges.
His copper's brain flips through details, memories, a case file assembled during two months of long nights and close, rumpled quarters. There, scrawled in the margins between the shirts she wears most often and the way she takes her tea, is the generic shampoo and washing powder smell of her, and it's nothing like this.
"Miller," he says, and then chases after it with a wince. "Or is it —?"
She shakes him off. "Still Miller," she says.
He wants to push it a little bit, and tries to tell himself it's for insight into victims and the grieving process, but it's not his job anymore, and the aftermath wasn't his strong suit even with a badge. It's more than that, concern or care, but he won't give it a name and he won't let himself ask.
She offers it up anyway. "I have two Miller boys," she says. "Didn't want it to seem like I was abandoning them."
If he takes a step back, if this were just a conversation on a regular day, about regular things, he'd ask another question, and he has a feeling Miller would appreciate that — normalcy, or his version of it.
"You didn't want to change theirs, too?"
His ex-wife couldn't file the paperwork fast enough, back to her maiden name for both herself and their daughter. Fresh starts and bullshit, piled on a lie.
Miller shakes her head. "No. It was — it seemed like a step backward, I just want to go forward."
It's spoken like a line from a handbook, some horrifying guidelines for dealing with this sort of thing, and he feels a flash of pride. Miller, and the strength she's always had. Miller, and the different sort of strength she's discovering.
"And yet you're back here?" His hand lifts in gesture at the bar, the hotel, the whole bloody town.
She shrugs, raising a finger toward Becca to order a pint. "You are, too."
He looks away in time to see Becca's eyes skitter back and forth between the two of them. Her face, though, is carefully neutral, sympathy masked by customer service and a living that depends, in part, on bypassing judgment and renting rooms instead.
It's been almost two months, almost as long as the case itself, and there's no use arguing it — he is back here, but it's not like he can explain it.
"Yeah," he confirms. "Relaxation in a seaside town, just what the doctor ordered." He taps at his chest, over his heart, but the movement feels disgusted, and it is. Disgusted that he can't fix himself, disgusted that it's keeping him from doing anything else either.
"The seaside town where you were assigned to a murder that your DS' husband committed," she says, and there's disgust in her, too, he can feel it. Hate yourself for long enough and it starts manifesting to the outside world.
She tips her head to the side briefly. "Sounds like a proper holiday. Well done, Hardy. You'll be back on your death bed in no time."
His eyebrows raise as he tries to parse through her voice. There's a vein of something running right through it, the old Ellie Miller, teasing him like he wasn't in on the joke, even if he feels — he hopes — they both knew he was.
"Well, that's the goal, isn't it? Life gone to shit, so you work yourself into the ground?"
Miller winces, and he wants to smack himself for being such a bastard.
"I didn't mean..." he tries to recover. "I meant me."
She nods, as Becca sets down a pint in front of each of them. He probably shouldn't drink it, should keep nursing the club soda that tastes like ash sitting in front of him, but it's been two months of very few flare ups, two months where the only stress in his life was that there wasn't any.
"I know what you meant," Miller says, and he lifts his pint.
She moves to clink her glass against his.
"Here's to the second meeting of the former detectives club," she says.
They both take a long drink, and it tastes like it should, like cold lager next to a mate, and he lets himself remember what that's like for only a moment.
"Still former, then? Thought you might have gone back," he says. "You didn't do anything wrong, the leave was just...it was..."
She sets her glass back down, twisting it a few times on the bar top. "I know what it was," she says. "But I can't go back there. Some detective I was, couldn't even find the murderer lying next to me. This town — it's not going to trust me after that. I don't trust me."
His hand tightens uselessly around his glass, they've had this conversation before, and he has a feeling she's had it with herself a million times since.
"The clues weren't there, Miller," he says, pausing to string the next bit together carefully. "And I trust you."
She exhales on a short laugh. "Wonderful," she says. "Do you have a job for me? Some sort of nursemaid? Give you your pills and check your temperature?"
He sidesteps the comment. If it makes her feel better to lash out, he'll certainly let her, but he doesn't need to paint himself up as a target just yet.
"What are you doing back, Miller?"
She shrugs. "You were right, my life is here. And Tom — Tom wants to stay. This week anyway. Last week, he wanted to stay in London. The week before that he wanted to move to America. I can't...how can I tell him no? He lost his best mate and his dad in a matter of months."
Hardy nods, the rhythm of the words like she's thought all this through countless times, like she's been waiting for someone to say them to.
"We're staying here for a bit, in the hotel. He's back in school. If he makes up his mind, we'll, I don't know, buy a new house, make new friends."
She turns to look at him. "What are you doing back?"
He shrugs, because he doesn't actually know, because he's been asking himself the same question since he got his room key this morning.
"My daughter..." Miller's eyebrows lift in surprise and he nods, confirming she heard him right. The story's been out for a month now, and there's no way she hasn't read it, no way she doesn't know about his family, but clearly she didn't expect him to address it.
He continues, "She still needs some time. Said I shouldn't have kept it from her in the first place. Things are...difficult."
Miller nods. "Sorry about your wife," she says, voice sympathetic, like those tiny flashes during the case when they were human to each other. Or, well, she was always human, wasn't she? It was him and his misery, and now he's got a part to play, and the least he can do is play it.
"Sorry about your husband," he parrots back, even if it's not the same.
"Yeah," she says, and takes another sip of her beer.
He follows along, matching her sip for sip, silence and survivor's guilt dancing through the air with the dust particles.
"How's your heart?" She finally asks.
"Beating," he says, something like warmth spreading in his veins when she gives him a half smile in response.
They've criss-crossed the same tired territory twice now, and he sees it laid out in front of him — they'll finish their drinks, go their separate ways, maybe see each other around town sometimes. But that still-beating heart of his could use a friend, and for reasons he can't explain, it's picked out Miller. Maybe he does have a job for her after all, mate to a miserable ex-copper with a bum ticker. Or maybe it's her that needs a friend, and him that's got a new job. Either way, the words tumble out.
"Do you wanna —"
She looks up. "What?"
"I don't know, Miller," he sounds exasperated, he feels exasperated. "Eat? Or something? What is it you said people do?"
She smiles, and it makes him sit up straighter.
"Are we still people?"
His posture deflates again. "Never mind, forget it, it was —"
She cuts him off, "Let's eat. Dinner, tonight. Only, I'll have the boys again, my sister's watching Fred now, but Tom'll be out of school by then, and..."
"It's fine," he says.
They exchange room numbers, and Hardy can't decide how he feels when they discover they're only across the hall from each other. It makes him wonder who checked in first, and it makes the slightly less neutral way Becca has begun watching them seem all the more suspect.
Regardless, he makes plans to stop over that evening, and they'll let Tom pick the place.
&&.
It's a small town and they're living in an even smaller version of it, the circle of people who don't blame Miller — who don't blame Ellie — and the circle of people that don't dislike him, too, intersecting and carving up the streets. Pockets of safety and pockets of risk, and they get dinner at a chippy just down the block from the hotel.
His wallet is out and he's paid for all of them before he can stop and examine the impulse to do it.
Miller gives him a look, nose faintly scrunched, and eyes squinting, and that alone is worth the cost of dinner for four. He's not quite used to the idea of a friend again, but he's sure you're supposed to entertain them, and Miller, above everything else, definitely looks entertained.
Confused, but entertained.
It lasts all the way until they're seated at a booth in the back, Fred buckled into a high chair at the head of the table, and Miller and Tom across from Hardy.
If he's going to eat a meal like this, he might as well embrace it, and he grabs the vinegar to shake out over his chips. Tom looks annoyed with him as he's doing it, and it's so familiar, so eerily familiar, every non-adult in his life constantly annoyed with him (and more than half of the adults, too), that he has to laugh.
"Would you like the vinegar, Tom?" He exaggerates the sentence, syrupy and obnoxious, and Tom's eyes widen at being caught out.
"Yeah," Tom says and Miller cuts him a look, the same one Hardy himself has been on the receiving end of. "Please," he adds.
Hardy hands it over with a dose of sympathy.
There's supposed to be conversation, he's sure of that much, but he can't settle on a topic. Everything he thinks up seems wrapped in explosives, just one wrong turn into uncomfortable at best, and emotionally devastating at worst. It's a lot of work, minding other people's feelings, and he's out of practice at it. He could be there for Miller in the moment, when there was no time to mind the bad habits he'd formed, left only to run on the impulse to comfort her, but now, with a bit of distance, he's floundering.
He looks at Fred at the head of the table, happily smashing chips in his chubby baby fingers. "Does that one talk yet?" He says, gesturing at the boy.
Miller stares at him, the sort of unbelieving, aghast amusement he'd gotten used to unfolding across her face. There, now, that's a bit of a step in the right direction.
"He'll babble," Miller says. "Sometimes repeat things. Try, Fred, say 'Hardy. Say Har-dy.'"
Fred stops his chip smashing, staring at his mother for only a moment before returning to it.
Tom jumps in. "That's not your real name though, is it? It's Alec, I read it online."
Before Miller can ask the question plainly on her lips, the one that probably has to do with why Tom's looking up that sort of stuff in the first place, and before he can correct Tom that he prefers Hardy, Tom's leaning across the table. He pulls the mangled potatoes from Fred's hands gently, getting the baby's attention.
"Freddy, say 'Alec,' go 'Alec! Alec!'"
Fred's still staring at the potatoes in his brother's hand, but opens his mouth all the same.
"Alec!" It's missing most of the consonant at the end, swallowed up like oatmeal in a numb mouth, but it's a valiant effort for a baby, and he seems delighted with himself, repeating it immediately. "Alec!"
Miller's laugh rings clear through the entire shop, and even Tom's smiling, as Hardy drops his head into his hands on the table.
"Fantastic," he groans, lifting his head back up. "Thanks for that, Tom."
Miller's laugh tapers into a snicker, as she nudges Tom and nods in approval.
It's easier after that, when he remembers that sometimes jokes can just be for fun, that there was a time in his life when he wasn't so serious.
He doesn't smile, not exactly, but watching Miller as a mum, outside the limits of a police investigation, it's nice, and he takes it in.
There's Tom talking about going out for the football team, the year round one that travels. There's Miller snatching a chip from his plate and trying to get Fred to try one with vinegar. There's even him, right in the middle, a story of how one of the first words his daughter could say clearly was, "bloody."
Bloody dada, bloody nappy, bloody biscuit, repeated and reinforced with loads of laughter from his wife.
He was happy once, and it doesn't hurt to remember that, too, at least not as much as it used to.
They pack it in shortly after, Miller handing off Fred to him as she moves to throw away the rubbish. Fred swipes a hand, a greasy, dirty hand across Hardy's face, giggling at the feel of stubble as he does it again and again.
Hardy doesn't smile, not yet, but when Fred presses his head to scratch against the stubble this time, his lips turn up, buried in the boy's hair.
&&.
He's not used to free time, and apparently Miller isn't either.
He sees her every morning for a week at the coffee shop down the street from the hotel, and it's only a moment's hesitation on that very first day before he joins her.
Sometimes Fred is with her, sometimes he's not, and he finds out she's enrolled him in daycare, but can't always bring herself to take him.
On Friday, he beats her there, making sure to get the table they keep sitting at, and dragging over a high chair just in case.
Fred isn't with her today, but she's clutching a thick stack of paperwork, and looking anxious.
He points at the cup of tea he'd already purchased for her and she collapses in the seat across from him, looking grateful as she shoves the papers aside and takes a long sip.
"What's all this?"
Miller sets the cup down, looking at the papers like they might spit on her.
"A panic attack," she says, and he lifts his eyebrows in sympathy.
"Do you want me to have a look?" He moves the top of the pile so he can read it.
There's a court case coming up, but the papers are something different, finances and forms, and, oh, Ellie.
"I'm gonna need a job again soon," she says, still eyeing the mess warily. "And Tom wants to stay, said so this morning, so we'll need a place to live. And then there's —"
He cuts her off, the way she's winding herself up already apparent.
"Miller."
Her eyes snap to his.
"One step at a time, eh? Let's go through this."
They spend most of the morning in a blizzard of red tape and numbers, but by the end of it, they've established a nice, tidy schedule for everything.
Two more weeks, at most, for the Miller family in the hotel, then into a rental property while they sell the old house. There's a brief conversation about moving back into it, but it ends with Miller's jaw clamped shut tightly, and Hardy's eyes darting away for a good look at the rest of the customers.
If she goes back to having an income by the time a month has passed, she should be able all right.
He needs to figure out his own situation, but there are fewer variables, and it's easier to keep his head down and focused on this instead.
At the same time, it's incredibly personal, the closed door business of someone else's life laid bare on a coffee shop table.
He's not sure what they're doing, what they're playing at with all this, but he does know, when he's not with her, his eyes fixate on orange windbreakers.
&&.
It's Saturday afternoon when he opens the door to his hotel room to see her again, standing behind Tom in the hallway.
There'd been a knock moments ago, breaking him out of the staring at his phone he'd spent the last hour doing. A text from his daughter had chimed around lunch, a picture of a half-built science fair project lying on a kitchen table he remembers buying.
There'd been no words, no context, and he'd run himself in circles about it. Was it a mistake? Was he supposed to be encouraging? Helpful? Couldn't she have gotten in the picture herself? Surely his ex-wife is somewhere and could've taken the photo.
He'd settled on: 'Looks good xoxo' after 20 minutes, sent it after another 10, and spent the remaining half hour trying to will a response into existence.
But now there's Tom, standing in his doorway, shuffling his feet and holding a football under one arm.
"Hello," Tom says, and turns back to Miller with pleading eyes, mouthing something Hardy can't make out. Miller shakes her head and points at Hardy, urging Tom to do...something.
"Hello, Tom," Hardy says, trying to ease him into it.
"Hello," Tom says again. "I mean, I have to practice," he holds up the football, "But I don't want anyone to know I'm practicing. I just want to show up at the try outs and be really good, you know?"
Hardy lifts his eyes to Miller, eyebrows raised — is he supposed to be able to make sense of that? — but Miller just shakes her head and nods at Tom.
"Right," Hardy says. "You have to practice. Did you want to do it in here? Because my room is any bigger than yours, and it seems like it's a nice day outside."
Tom's trainer twists into the carpeting, getting increasingly irritated at not being understood.
"No, I need a defender," he says. "And Mum's rubbish at football, plus Fred just gets in the way. Do you want to — do you want to play?" He holds up the football in front of him.
Behind Tom, Miller smiles, and he's agreed before he can stop himself.
&&.
It's a long walk to the area Tom wants to practice in, and Hardy doesn't question it, following along as Miller pushes Fred in a buggy and Tom skateboards alongside them. It is a nice day, sunny and warmer than it should be this of year, and he can't remember a time when he was outside to enjoy the weather just for the sake of it.
There's a bit of teasing from Miller about the t-shirt Hardy's wearing. It's dark green, and without a logo or adornment, but apparently the fact that it's not collared is enough to get her laughing.
"You have a neck!" She crows, "There's not just a void where your tie ought to go! And jeans, too! You look like a...like a..."
He raises his eyebrows, curious to see where this sentence is going.
"Well, I don't know what you look like, but it's definitely a switch."
He's sure she could've come up with a hundred words for what he looks like — actually human, ridiculous, a bit too skinny, but there's something to the conversations they've been having lately, something there'd been glimpses of months ago, during late nights in the break room. It's civil and friendly and teasing and he wants so much more of it.
"What about you? Finally took that orange jacket off, might not mistake you for a traffic cone anymore. How ever will I know when to merge?"
He points at the yellow shirt she's wearing. "At least I'll still know when to yield."
It's nice, actually, the yellow shirt she's wearing, and he lets himself think about it while Miller jogs ahead to catch Tom, who's skateboarded farther ahead of them.
It's made of something vaguely clingy, and really is properly, brightly yellow — it makes her look healthy. It makes her look pretty, too, or, well, really hammers home that she is pretty. Something he's been doing his best to ignore. Ellie Miller in her clingy yellow shirt, smelling of oranges, and being pretty.
Because that's the last thing he needs.
And the last thing she needs.
And he certainly doesn't spend any time at all thinking more about it as she chases Fred around the grass at the park, as she laughs at Hardy when he falls diving to save a goal, as she squints into the sun and smiles.
Except he does.
&&.
Sunday night, and he's somehow been roped into dinner at Miller's sister's house.
He's not even sure how it happened really, one minute he'd been heading downstairs for some dinner at the hotel, and the next he was being dragged from the hotel by the arm, Miller's hand warm through the material of his (collared, again) shirt.
"I can't be the only person you talk to, Hardy," Miller's saying, as she unlocks the car and bundles Fred into his car seat, Tom piling in next to it.
"You're hardly the only person I talk to," Hardy grumbles, tucking himself into the passenger seat anyway. "There's Tom." He gestures at the backseat, where Tom is already thumbing at his mobile, completely disinterested in their conversation. "And Fred, talk to Fred, don't I? Fred, say 'Alec."
Miller finishes with the buckles on the car seat in time for Fred to screech in her ear, "Alec!"
"See?" Hardy nods as Miller makes her way to the driver's seat.
She starts the car and manuevers into traffic, picking the thread right back up.
"Talking to different members of the Miller family doesn't count. We're all one unit," she says, and then her face clouds over. They're doing a bang up job of not speaking about Joe, and Hardy's following Miller's own lead on it most of the time.
He waits a moment to see if she'll pursue it this time, and when she doesn't, he dives back in.
"And Becca Fisher," he says. "I talk to Becca Fisher."
Miller's eyes dart sideways, lingering longer than he would like for someone driving a car, but traffic is light.
"Do you?" She draws the question out, implications hanging in the air.
"Oh, come off it," he says. "Not like that. For...hotel stuff. Telly's broken, hot water's gone. You — you talk to Becca Fisher, too, I know you do."
Miller shrugs and nods, exagerrated and smirking. "Of course I do," she says. "But she's never been my wife."
Hardy scrubs at the back of his neck. "You heard about that then? This bloody town! You know there are — privacy laws and, and, and propriety!"
Miller laughs. "In Broadchurch? Come on now, you've been here long enough to know that's not true."
He grunts in acknowledgment, watching the road for a few quiet moments before Miller speaks again.
"Heard about that one months ago," she says. "But I may have heard about something else recently...Something around the same time? With the same woman?"
Hardy's stomach drops to floor, the back of his neck going hot. No, she couldn't be talking about — Becca wouldn't have said — no. No, no.
No.
Miller's eyes cut back to him and he tries to reign in all the physical signs of his discomfort, but it's no use, she's seen.
"Why, DI Hardy, did you try to pull the proprietor of our very own Broadchurch hotel?"
He shrinks back into his seat, making a smaller target of himself, and if his heart's been good lately, it's making up for it now, embarrassment thick as it rushes through his veins.
She smacks the steering wheel. "You did, didn't you? Ha!"
Hardy shoves his face into his hands, muffling the words with his fingers. "I can't believe she told you."
Miller stops behind a line of cars queued at a light, turning to face Hardy more fully.
"A couple of days ago," Miller says. "More of a laugh than anything, I don't think she meant anything by it."
Hardy rolls his eyes. "Fantastic."
The light has changed and Miller accelerates, turning away from him again.
"It's fine, don't worry about it," she says. "Wasn't even sure you had those sorts of impulses, actually. Well done you on hiding them so well."
Somehow that's worse than any of it, that he's apparently walking around like some sort of metaphorical eunuch. So much so that Miller can't even imagine he has a sex drive.
He shifts in his seat, until nearly his entire body is facing her.
"I do," he says, quiet and low and more than a little irritated.
"Oh," she says.
And they spend the rest of the drive in silence.
&&.
Dinner at Miller's sister's house is even more interminable than the car ride to get there, which is saying something.
But here, there's more people, and there's all sorts of nervous glances between everyone, there's a roast that's far too dry, and wine that inexplicably tastes like plastic.
Olly keeps looking at him and Miller like he's thinking of starting a gossip column, eyes carefully trained on the placement of their hands, and bloody journalists, always picking up on things that aren't even there.
Much. That aren't even there much. Because now that he knows it's in question, he's certainly not going to deny the existence of his sex drive to himself.
"I was surprised to see you back here, DI Hardy," Lucy says. "When that story came out," she pauses to look at Olly with a smile, "I thought you might be back on the force in a bigger city somewhere. Exonerrated and all that."
He reaches for his wine, taking a large sip, plastic taste or not. "It's just Hardy now. I''ve got some medical...challenges. The brass don't like those."
Fred chooses that moment to let out a very high-pitched squeal, for no reason at all.
Hardy couldn't be more grateful.
&&.
The next week passes like the week before it, meetings at the coffee shop, idle banter and idle silences.
This time Miller comes equipped with the rental listings and they spend the early afternoons walking and driving the town to check them out.
There's a two level house that backs up to one of the cliffs and it's the best thing they've seen —choices are limited in a town this size — but it's out of Miller's price range.
The second floor is more of a finished attic. There's a bathroom, a bedroom, and a small living space, but it's enough to knock the cost up into unmanagable.
"Maybe you could get a flatmate or something," Hardy says as they drive by it again. It's far enough from the center of town that it feels untouched, fresh air and grass, and he understands why she likes it. Even if the sound of the waves is making him a little mental.
Miller eyes him from the driver's seat. "Maybe," she says, pausing. "How much do you think it would be, that top floor?"
Hardy shrugs. "400 quid? 350? Miller, I haven't the faintest idea."
She turns away from the house, Tom will be getting off of school soon, and Miller usually meets him.
"Do you think it would be less than staying in a hotel for a month?" She asks, and why is she looking at him like that?
He nods. "We've been over this, you've only got one more week in the hotel, you've got to find a place."
She's still looking at him, and it unnerves him, the way she doesn't mind taking her eyes from the road. His ex-wife used to do that and it drove him spare every time.
"I know," she says. "Wasn't talking about me."
"Well, who were you talking abou— oh, no. Miller, no, no, no. You don't want to live with me, I'm...I'm a mess."
She shakes her head. "You're not, I've seen your hotel room. Not so bad, just a little clutter."
There's something warring in him, things that think it would be a bad idea, and things that think it would be a brilliant one, and he can't figure out what to give voice to.
How did he even end up here? Him, Alec Hardy, a conversation away from playing house with his DS.
Again.
"I don't even know if I'm staying," he says.
"You don't know that you're not," she shoots back. "What's the harm in taking it month by month, instead of weekly?"
He tries again. "I don't even have a job."
"Neither do I."
They sign the papers the next week.
&&.
tbc.