The Last Word
Copyright© 2026 by Heel
Chapter 3: The Last Word
For several days after the incident in the kitchen, Dona lived with the peculiar feeling that her life had divided into two separate parts, one belonging to the woman she had been before the accident on the coastal road, and the other to the frightened, exhausted stranger who now occupied her apartment. Before, she had taken her body for granted, trusting her legs to carry her wherever she wished, trusting her knees to bend when she sat down, climbed stairs, or slipped behind the steering wheel of her little red sports car. Now every movement demanded planning, patience, and a degree of concentration that left her tired before the day had properly begun. Her right leg was enclosed in a rough white plaster cast that extended from her upper calf to her thigh, holding the injured knee firmly in place, while her left leg remained uninjured in appearance but stubbornly stiff, refusing to bend more than a few degrees. Even with her crutches, she moved awkwardly through the apartment, her shoulders aching from the effort of supporting her weight, and the simple journey from her bedroom to the kitchen had become a small expedition requiring careful preparation.
The doctors had offered explanations, but none had been convincing. They spoke of unusual neurological reactions, functional movement disorders, and the possibility that the trauma of the accident had somehow affected her nervous system, although the examinations had revealed no clear structural damage that could account for the severity of her symptoms. They reassured her that further investigations might provide answers, but Dona had begun to distrust reassurance, particularly when it was delivered with the cautious expression of someone who had run out of useful things to say. At night, she lay awake listening to the ordinary sounds of the building, the faint movement of pipes behind the walls, the distant elevator, and the footsteps of neighbours crossing the corridor, while her mind returned again and again to the old woman lying on the road.
Margaret Bell, the police had eventually discovered, had been seventy-eight years old. She had lived alone in a small house several miles from the place where Dona had struck her, and there was no obvious reason for her to have been standing in the middle of the road that afternoon. The investigation had established the circumstances of the collision, and the police had accepted that Dona had not been driving recklessly enough to make the accident intentional, but none of that could explain why the dying woman had gripped her wrist with such extraordinary determination or why she had repeated that strange word with the solemnity of someone delivering a final command. Stiff. Stiff. Stiff. Dona had tried to convince herself that the word was merely a fragment of delirium, perhaps the result of pain or a confused mind struggling to communicate something that no longer made sense, yet whenever she thought about it, she remembered Margaret’s eyes, which had remained frighteningly clear even as the rest of her face had begun to lose its strength.
The name of Margaret’s daughter appeared in the police report, and for two days Dona hesitated before asking a private investigator to help her locate the woman. She told herself that she wanted to apologise properly, although she had already done so through the police, and that perhaps meeting a relative would help her understand something about the old woman’s final moments. Beneath those reasonable explanations, however, lay a more uncomfortable need: she wanted someone else to hear what had happened and tell her that the word had meant nothing, that she had not imagined the peculiar force behind it, and that her own body was not somehow obeying the last utterance of a stranger who had died in her arms.
Peter Shaw, the retired police investigator she eventually hired, proved to be a quiet, methodical man who did not laugh at her questions or offer easy conclusions. He found the daughter within a few days. Her name was Eleanor Bell, she was fifty-six years old, and she had been widowed several years earlier. She had worked as a school secretary before retiring, and she now lived alone in a modest house on the outskirts of another coastal town, where the streets grew quieter as they approached the sea and the gardens were separated by low stone walls and weather-beaten wooden fences. Peter gave Dona the address and advised her to consider whether the visit would truly help her, but she had already made up her mind.
On the morning she set out, Dona spent nearly an hour getting ready. The plaster cast made dressing awkward, and the rigid position of her right leg prevented her from sitting comfortably while she pulled on her trousers. She eventually chose a loose skirt that could be arranged around the cast without too much difficulty, then struggled into a pair of flat shoes, her face tightening whenever she accidentally moved the injured leg against the furniture. Her left knee, although free of plaster, remained stiff enough to make standing from a chair an unpleasant exercise, and she had to use the arms of the chair and both crutches to raise herself upright. By the time she reached the taxi waiting outside her building, a thin sheen of perspiration had appeared along her hairline, and she was already wondering whether she had made a mistake.
The journey took a little over an hour. The town gradually gave way to quieter streets, then to stretches of road lined with small gardens, old trees, and houses whose paint had faded under years of salt air. Dona sat in the back seat with her crutches beside her, her casted leg extended as comfortably as the cramped space allowed, and watched the landscape pass through the window. She had rehearsed what she intended to say, imagining herself standing at Eleanor’s door and offering a sincere apology, explaining how desperately she had tried to stop, how she had held Margaret while she died, and how sorry she was that no words could undo what had happened. But each time she practised the speech in her mind, she reached the moment when Margaret had spoken that strange word, and the rest of the sentences dissolved into uncertainty.
Eleanor’s house was smaller than Dona had expected, a narrow, pale building with a low roof, a short path leading to the front door, and a garden in which a few neglected plants leaned towards the afternoon light. There was nothing sinister about it. A pair of gardening gloves rested on a windowsill, a small wind chime hung beneath the porch, and the front curtains had been drawn back to allow the sun into the rooms. If anything, the place looked lonely rather than threatening, the home of someone who had grown accustomed to silence and no longer expected visitors to arrive without warning. Dona climbed out of the taxi with difficulty, using the door frame for support as she brought her rigid legs into position, and paid the driver before beginning the slow, awkward journey up the path.
She had barely knocked twice when the door opened.
The woman standing before her was of average height, with fine grey-brown hair cut neatly around her face and a narrow figure that seemed almost delicate beneath a dark cardigan. She looked older than fifty-six at first glance, although there was nothing particularly unusual about that; grief, loneliness, and the ordinary passage of time could make a person appear older than the number attached to their name. Her expression was calm, neither welcoming nor hostile, and her eyes moved from Dona’s face to the crutches, then down to the large white cast that held her right leg rigid.
“Mrs Bell?” Dona asked, feeling suddenly foolish for having rehearsed a question whose answer was obvious.
“Yes.”
“My name is Dona. I was involved in the accident with your mother.”
Eleanor did not step back immediately. For a moment she remained in the doorway, her hand resting on the edge of the door, while something passed across her face that Dona could not quite identify. It was not the shock she had expected, nor the anger she had prepared herself to endure. The woman seemed to be examining her with a kind of patient attention, as though Dona had arrived carrying something that Eleanor had been waiting a long time to see.
“I know who you are,” Eleanor said at last. “The police told me.”
Her voice was quiet and even, without any of the emotion Dona had anticipated, and that calmness made the next few seconds more difficult than an angry response might have been. Dona had imagined being confronted with tears, accusations, perhaps even a slap across the face, and she had accepted beforehand that she would deserve whatever grief the daughter chose to express. Instead, Eleanor moved aside and invited her in with a small gesture of her hand, leaving Dona to negotiate the doorway with her crutches and rigid legs.
“Come in. You must have had a difficult journey.”
The sitting room was tidy but old-fashioned, furnished with a brown sofa, two armchairs, and a small table covered with family photographs. The air carried the faint smell of furniture polish and tea, and the curtains allowed a pale strip of sunlight to fall across the carpet. Dona lowered herself into an armchair with considerable effort, keeping her casted leg extended in front of her while she arranged the crutches within reach. Eleanor watched her struggle without offering assistance, although her expression suggested that she had noticed every uncomfortable movement.
“I’m sorry,” Dona began, once she had caught her breath. “I know that saying it cannot possibly be enough, and I don’t expect you to forgive me. I tried to stop. She appeared suddenly around a bend, and I didn’t have enough time to avoid her. I called for help, but by the time anyone arrived, she was already—”
Her voice faltered. She looked down at her hands, fingers clasped so tightly that the knuckles had begun to pale, and struggled to find a way of finishing the sentence without making Margaret’s death sound like a mere unfortunate conclusion to a sequence of events. She remembered the warmth of the old woman’s hand, the weight of her head against her arm, and the terrible moment when the struggle to breathe had ceased. No matter how carefully she chose her words, the truth remained brutally simple: Margaret Bell had died while Dona held her.
“I held her,” she continued, speaking more quietly. “I stayed with her until the police came. I tried to keep her comfortable, but there was nothing I could do. I’m so sorry.”
Eleanor sat in the opposite armchair, her hands resting neatly in her lap. She did not interrupt, and she did not look away. That lack of response made Dona increasingly uncomfortable, because the woman’s silence seemed to demand something more than an apology, although Dona could not determine what that something might be. She had expected grief to be visible, perhaps in trembling hands or a strained voice, but Eleanor’s face remained composed, almost unnaturally so, and the stillness in her expression reminded Dona of the old woman’s final gaze on the road.
“Did she say anything?” Eleanor asked.
The question came so abruptly that Dona looked up. “What do you mean?”
“Before she died. Did my mother say anything to you?”
Dona hesitated. She had wondered whether to mention the word at all, afraid that Eleanor might interpret it as an attempt to distract from her responsibility or as some strange excuse for the accident. Yet she had come partly because the word had followed her ever since that afternoon, and withholding it now seemed pointless. She could still hear Margaret’s voice, weakened by pain but strangely deliberate, and she remembered how the old woman’s fingers had tightened around her wrist each time she spoke.
“She said one word,” Dona replied. “Three times, actually. She kept saying, ‘Stiff.’ I didn’t understand what she meant. I thought perhaps she was trying to tell me something, but she couldn’t explain.”
For the first time, Eleanor’s expression changed in a way Dona could clearly see. The corners of her mouth lifted, not into a warm or happy smile, but into a small, controlled movement that seemed to belong to a private thought. Her gaze remained fixed on Dona, and for several seconds she said nothing at all. The silence grew uncomfortable enough that Dona shifted in her chair, only to feel the familiar resistance in her left knee and the unyielding pressure of the plaster around her right leg.
Then Eleanor smiled a little more.
“Limp,” she said.
Dona stared at her. “I’m sorry?”
“Limp,” Eleanor repeated, with the same quiet precision her mother had used on the road. “That is what she should have said.”
The words were so unexpected that Dona could only look at her, waiting for an explanation that did not come. Eleanor’s smile faded, leaving her face as composed as before, and she folded her hands together in her lap as though the conversation had reached its natural conclusion. Dona tried to read something in her expression, searching for grief, resentment, or perhaps a trace of madness, but there was nothing she could confidently identify. The woman simply sat there, watching her, and the ordinary sitting room seemed to have become a place in which every familiar object was suddenly misplaced.
“What does that mean?” Dona asked. “Why would she say that?”
Eleanor tilted her head slightly. “I think you should go home now.”
“But I don’t understand.”
“No,” Eleanor replied. “I suppose you don’t.”
She rose from her chair, signalling that the visit was over, and Dona had no choice but to gather her crutches and begin the exhausting process of standing. Her injured right leg remained locked inside the plaster, and the left knee resisted as she pushed herself upright, forcing her to lean heavily on the crutches while she found her balance. Eleanor stood beside the doorway, watching without offering assistance, and when Dona finally turned to look at her, the woman’s expression had returned to one of quiet politeness.
“Thank you for coming,” Eleanor said.