Yet just as she had not been able to wash away the stain of her stupidity, nor could she rid herself of the worthlessness that consumed her from then on. It made her abandon her degree course, and whatever sense of direction or ambition she’d previously possessed was now gone. It all seemed so pointless. And confirming what her father had always said about her, that she could never stick at anything and see it through, she drifted aimlessly through a series of dead-end jobs and boyfriends.

Then twelve years later, she met Rick, who everybody believed was the perfect boyfriend for her. A boyfriend who would provide some much-needed stability in her life.

Chapter Fifty-Five

‘It’s all my fault, Ellis,’ Naomi had sobbed. ‘Everything that’s happened to Willow is down to me. I failed to do the single most important thing a mother should do, and that was to keep her safe.’

Ellis had listened in horror to what Naomi had reluctantly shared with him when they’d come up to bed. She hadn’t meant to tell him, but the burden of it had been too much and she’d broken down and told him everything. Afterwards, and out of respect to Willow, she’d begged him not to breathe a word of it to anyone. A man of his word, he’d promised her faithfully that he wouldn’t.

To his great sorrow there was nothing he could say that would shake Naomi out of the erroneous belief that she was to blame for what had happened to her daughter. All he could do was hold her and let her cry out her distress. For Willow’s sake she had held her emotions in check throughout the day and evening, but alone in bed with Ellis, her strength had given way to tears of self-recrimination and anguish. Her heart, she’d said, was shattered into a thousand pieces by what Willow had shared on the beach with her and Martha, and she would never forgive herself for what her youngest daughter had gone through.

Eventually she had succumbed to emotional exhaustion and fallen asleep, but next to her, Ellis lay wide awake in the darkness, his mind too restless to switch off and call it a day. He kept thinking how wrong it was that victims frequently ended up blaming themselves, while the likes of Colin and Rick – the perpetrators of the abuse – never did. Did their declarations of remorse and pleas for forgiveness ever have an ounce of genuine sincerity to them? Ellis didn’t think they had, for how else could they do what they did?

Naomi’s justification for blaming herself was on the grounds that she had put Willow, at a young and impressionable age, in a position whereby she had witnessed acts of violence which she had then absorbed as being normal, simply part and parcel of being in a relationship. Ellis had tried to reason with Naomi that if anyone was to blame it was Colin.

‘If Colin were still alive,’ Ellis had asserted, ‘wouldn’t you hold him accountable for what Willow saw as a child? Does he not have a part to play when it comes to apportioning blame?’