"What?" I looked at Ella in shock.
"He left me… he fucking left me," she cried, hot tears streaming down her face.
I pulled her into a tight hug immediately, holding her like she might fall apart in my arms. I didn't know what to say because nothing I could think of felt big enough to carry what she was going through.
"I'm so sorry, Ella," I said quietly as she shook against me, her breathing uneven and broken.
After a moment, I asked gently, trying to keep my voice steady even though my chest felt tight, "When did this happen?"
She wiped her face with the back of her hand, but the tears kept coming anyway. "Last night," she said, her voice trembling. "He just called… and said he couldn't do it anymore. He said he was done with everything, with us, with me… like I didn't even matter."
I felt my stomach drop at the way she said it, like she was still trying to process it herself even while saying it out loud.
"I kept calling him," she continued, her voice breaking again. "He didn't pick up. I waited thinking maybe he would text back, explain, say something, anything… but he didn't. He just disappeared like I was nothing."
I tightened my arms around her slightly, rubbing her back slowly because I could feel how much she was shaking. I wasn't good at this, I never was, but I stayed anyway because leaving her alone in that moment didn't even feel like an option.
She pulled back a little to look at me, her eyes red and swollen like she hadn't slept at all. "And now my dad…" she stopped, like the words were too heavy to finish properly. She swallowed hard before forcing it out. "He's gone too."
My chest went cold at that, like everything inside me just paused.
For a second I couldn't even speak because it felt like the room had shifted. I held her a little tighter again, not knowing how to respond to something that deep, something that unfair.
"I don't even know how to feel," she whispered. "Everything just keeps breaking at once and I feel like I can't breathe properly. It's like I keep losing people"
I rested my head slightly against hers, my voice softer than before. "You don't have to figure anything out right now. Just stay here with me, okay?"
And she did.
She just cried quietly in my arms like she had nothing left to hold onto except that moment.
At that point, I wasn't even thinking about Stephen anymore. It didn't feel important compared to what Ella was going through right in front of me.
Seeing her like that made everything else fade into the background, like my own problems suddenly didn't deserve space.
I just kept holding her, trying to steady her even though I didn't really know how. Ella had always been the kind of person who talked about her dad with so much love, like he was her safe place in the world. She used to smile when he called her his princess, and now hearing her talk like he was gone forever made my chest feel heavy in a way I couldn't explain properly.
She wasn't like me at all in that way. I never really had that kind of closeness, so I couldn't even imagine what it felt like to lose it so suddenly. It made me feel useless, like I was standing next to something too big to fix with words or comfort.
Ella stayed quiet for a moment, her breathing still uneven as she leaned into me. I could feel how exhausted she was, like crying had taken everything out of her.
"How does someone even get over something like this?" I asked softly, more to myself than anything else, because the thought genuinely scared me. It's not the kind of pain that sorry would fix.
There was no version of this where you just woke up and felt okay again, and that realization sat heavily between us.
She didn't answer immediately. She just clung to me a little tighter, like the silence was the only response she had left.
And I didn't move. I just stayed there with her, because at that point, there really wasn't anything else I could do.