Chapter Fifty-Four

Ciara

Now

Stella sleeps with her arm wrapped tightly around my middle. She is the big spoon to my little spoon and her embrace is reassuring, protective, pure.

She held me in her arms and rocked me while I cried and roared and spilled my darkest secrets out. She said all the right things. She cried too. For the child I was and for the woman I have become – one who is scared to trust, who is confused about love, who lashes out with a tongue so sharp it can cut. The woman who has been holding this secret shame inside for two decades.

All the time she said the words I needed to hear, over and over and over. This was not my fault. I was a child. I did nothing wrong. He, Joe McKee, the man who I was grieving for in the most fractured of ways, was a monster.

I talked about all my mixed feelings. My anger at his betrayal. The rising sense that something was very wrong. The misplaced love. The rejection. The pain and anger. The shame. There was so much shame. Shame that I had, despite everything, begged him to come back into my life. How sick was I?

We talked about help. About support. About counselling. She held my hair back when I did indeed empty what little had been sitting in my stomach down the toilet. And she sat me tenderly on the edge of the bath and gently washed away my tears and the grime of the day with a facecloth.

She put my toothpaste on my brush for me and I know that if my arms had been too tired to brush, she would have done that, too.

She helped my exhausted body, the one that had felt as if it was wrong and dirty all these years, into a bath and she gently, so very gently, soaped me and cleaned me. And when we were done, for the first time in years I felt truly clean.

My body numb, she helped me to dress, slipping on my knickers for me and pulling the oversized T-shirt I slept in over my head. Taking my brush from the dresser, she teased it through my hair, and then she pulled back the bed covers and helped me to lie down.

‘No one will ever hurt you again,’ she’d whispered as she had wrapped her arms around me.

And I had never felt so loved, or so protected before. I felt the shame that had held me down for almost my whole life start to ebb away.

The sun is shining on the front of the house at Aberfoyle Crescent. It’s glinting off the windows, making the place look warm and welcoming. There’s no sign at all, from the exterior, of the drama that has gone on behind those doors over the last week.

If walls could talk, I think wryly, they’d tell a very different story on the inside. Then again, it’s definitely better that they can’t.